6 Common Misconceptions About SEO

Google continues to update its algorithms every day. Some metrics and some information are changing with new ones. It is not easy to follow all the updates, so let’s examine the mistakes that we think are right today.

Meta Keywords is a Ranking Factor!

Meta keywords is a field in which keywords that are invisible to the visitor are entered in the source code of the page to describe the content of a page.

<meta name="keywords" content="SEO Specialist,Perfist,Buğra Özer"/>

Google stated in a blog they shared in September 2009 that the Meta Keywords tag is not a ranking factor. Other search engines no longer use the meta keyword tag as a ranking factor either. Only Yandex is known to use it as a low-weight ranking factor

For detailed information: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag?hl=tr

Using <changefreq> and <priority> in Sitemap.xml

What is Changefreq

We can determine the frequency of page changes in this metric and Google will crawl your page accordingly.

Available metrics:

• Yearly
• Monthly
• Weekly
• Daily
• Hourly
• Never
• Anytime

What is Priority

It is a metric that allows you to prioritize the URLs on your site. You can give a value between 0 and 1. A value of 1.0 will be your top priority page.

Although the metrics we explained above are currently not taken into account by Google and other search engines, they are still used by many SEO experts. You can take a look at John Müller’s answer on this topic:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-priority-change-frequency-xml-sitemap-20273.html

The More Backlinks The Better

This mistake made by many people is actually the situation that causes the greatest damage to our websites. Unnatural looking artificial link purchases noticed by Google and other search engines result in penalties to our websites.

Getting a link from every site we see does not provide any benefit to us, the most important thing is to get a link related to the page where you have a customer base and to which you will get a link.

Getting a backlink is actually a work that should be started after the site has finished all the on-page and off-page work and close to the end. It can bring very good traffic to your site, but backlink work, which is likely to bring huge penalties, should be done carefully. For detailed information, How to Get Backlinks? You can read our blog post.

Longer Content is Better

Long content is not a ranking factor!

Having more words does not mean the article will rank higher than the short article. What is important for Google is which of the information to be transferred is better transferred, rather than too many words.

Just Enough for Technical SEO Ranking

Unfortunately, we can only take our site so far with technical SEO. We can think of SEO as a jigsaw puzzle, for which we need to put all the pieces together. It doesn’t matter that our site opens very quickly after we can’t tell the user and Google about our page, so don’t just say it’s enough for technical SEO ranking 🙂