4 SEO Myths That Might Be Ruining Your Results

If you’re a small business owner trying to optimize your website for the best search traffic possible, you’re probably listening to all sorts of advice and trying to learn as much as you can whenever you can. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions floating around out there can wreck havoc on all your hard efforts.

If you fall prey to these myths, you might be spending lots of time, lots of effort, and lots of money that is literally going wasted. Here are four myths that might be sabotaging your SEO efforts.

Myth #1 – I must get a #1 ranking

Sure, a #1 ranking is great. But it’s also time consuming and expensive. And in some instances, it’s just not possible. After all, how can a small business possibly hope to out-position YouTube or Wikipedia? In many cases, these information laden sites often dominate for your prized keywords.

If you can achieve a number one raking for your keywords, that’s fantastic. But if not, I don’t believe it’s the end of the world. Instead of racking your brains and breaking your budget trying to get that #1 spot, why not let just your visitors do their research at Wikipedia and YouTube? As long as they’re coming back to your site to make their actual purchases, it doesn’t matter that you’re not number one. Ranking fourth or fifth is still extremely beneficial, and it’s much easier on the pocketbook. And it leaves you more time to spend on other efforts, such as site optimization and user experience.

Myth #2 – I must get tons and tons of traffic to my website

Again, lots of traffic is great. But I see many small business owners spending too much time focusing solely on getting traffic. They tweak their title tags and rewrite their meta descriptions in the hopes of luring visitors to their web page. They make changes on a daily basis and they live and breath based on their traffic stats.

But then what? What good is all this traffic if it isn’t converting into paying customers? If you’re spending hours upon hours driving traffic without paying attention to what you want that traffic to do, you’re wasting time.

So before you spend any more time driving any more visitors to your site, take a look at your conversion rate. It is true that conversion rates vary by industry, but a good rule of thumb is to expect a 2% conversion rate. That means if your web page is selling widgets, for every 100 visitors to your page, you should have 2 sales.

If you’re not achieving a 2% conversion rate, your time would be better spent fixing the problem(s) than driving more traffic. Maybe your meta description is misleading – is your traffic expecting something else at your page? Maybe your body copy is insufficient – do you need the help of a professional copywriter?

Remember, traffic that doesn’t convert is useless. It’s much better to have a 4% conversion of 50 visitors than a 1% conversion of 100 visitors.

Myth #3 – I must get my SEO efforts perfect

There is no such thing as perfect SEO. Optimizing your website is a little bit art and a little bit science. There are many differing opinions and trials and errors involved. There are trade offs between what the robots want and what your site visitors want. If you’re trying to get all this perfect, then you’re really wasting your time, and after all, time is money.

But the biggest problem I see with the “perfect SEO” myth is the expectation that one day I will get my SEO perfect and then I can just sit back and rest on my laurels. If you’re striving for perfection in order to “finish” your SEO project, that is a dangerous line of thinking. Because your SEO project will never be done. There will always be new keywords that need to be researched. There will be new pages to add to your site. There will be headlines that need to be tweaked and partners that need to be linked to.

And to make matters worse, the search engines are constantly changing. What was perfect last month won’t be perfect next month. So if you’re aiming for perfection in order to be finished, or not rolling out your changes until they are perfect, I urge you to be an end to the notion of perfection and get on with your never-ending SEO project.

Myth #4 – If I don’t see an improvement quickly, I must have done something wrong

Optimizing your web site and noticing significant ranking improvements can be a very time consuming process.  Success does not happen overnight. And if your site is a new one or has had very little traffic in the past, chances are you’ll have to wait even longer to see the improvements.

While there are a myriad of reasons why it might take some time to notice significant improvements, one of the factors I’d like to mention is your website crawl rate. The crawl rate is simply how often Google (or the other search engines) comes by to spider through your website. There are many things that affect your site’s crawl rate, such as:

• the number of sites linking into your site
• the authority of the sites linking into your site
• the amount of fresh content you add to your site
• your internal linking structure
• your sitemap and your robots.txt file
• your website server resources

If your site is new or if you don’t have many sites linking into your, your crawl rate might be slower. Which can cause a serious problem if you’re expecting immediate improvements from your optimization efforts. You see, the changes that you made might indeed lead to an improvement in your ranking. But Google hasn’t crawled your site yet, so they aren’t aware of your changes. If you don’t see an immediate improvement, and you go and make even more changes, you might be undoing all the great work you did that Google just hasn’t discovered yet. You’d be much better off to be patient and realize that search engine optimization takes time. If you work too fast, you might just be throwing your work down the drain.

You might also be interested in:

• Another Front Page Google Listing
• Why Won’t My Site Show Up in Google?
• Using Website Bounce Rate to Improve Your Small Business Marketing
• Using Anchor Text to Draw in Website Visitors
• The Single Most Affordable SEO Tip Around

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 7:50 am and is filed under Affordable SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.