There are a lot of myths, some were never true, some used to be true until Google and other search engines changed the rules. Here are some common myths many marketers still believe:
- Keywords in your domain name are important – It’s not important. Google doesn’t look at the domain name in determining rank anymore. They used to, but not anymore.
- Social media doesn’t help rank – Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google + have a huge influence on where you are ranked both through backlinks and through what people are saying about you.
- You should submit your site to Google and other search engines – The crawlers do this automatically now, usually in a matter of a couple days. There is no advantage to submitting a site unless something about your site causes it to not be indexed, which is a problem with the site, not a submission issue.
- H1 is the most important thing ever – Google doesn’t rank headings that way. H1, H2, etc, it’s all the same to Google.
- Linking to high ranking sites is helpful – It’s not at all helpful. If it were, any site could rank high just by adding a bunch of links to Facebook, Craig’s List, Wikipedia, and YouTube. What matters is whether these sites link to you.
- Usability only matters for human users – While that is the main reason your site needs to be very easy to navigate, if humans have trouble so will web crawlers, and this can hurt your ranking.
- Internal links don’t matter – Internal linking falls under usability. If you are mentioning an area of your site, linking from within that text makes navigation easier for crawlers (as well as people). By the same token, sporadic or irrelevant internal links for the sake of linking may do more harm than good.