Professional SEO Knowledge That Professionals Do NOT Want You to Know.
Have you ever invested in SEO for your website, waited for months, and after a long waiting, nothing really happened?
Well, this is the case for thousands of website owners right now. This means this is sending a negative message about SEO.
Today I want to get SEO naked; yes, you read it right! Enough of trying to convince people that SEO is important, and to the other side, the “SEO experts”, that they need to do things right.
Because the bottom line is; Yes, all websites need SEO, as much as all SEO professionals need to do things right.
But let´s get into the core of the matter, shall we?
The Dark Side of SEO
Yes, Search Engine Optimization has a black side. A side that few people want to see, and when they do, sometimes they ignore it or just stop SEO investment for good. In both cases, we need to take the right actions. Corrective actions, I must say.
The dark side of SEO is the side that you don’t need, but if you ignore what you are reading here, you won’t be able to recognise it until it is too late, and you have wasted money or resources; if we put it more softly.
Here you have five terrible consequences of being a victim of the dark side of SEO:
You might think that an SEO expert that talks like he is an expert; is an expert! But wait for you to read these common consequences listed below!
1️⃣. Times wasted:
The most important resource we have is time; once you lose it, it will never return. And it gets worse when you invest money in the hope that your SEO guy knows what he is doing. To find out later that what he was doing didn’t move the needle in your business’s favour.
2️⃣. Website reputation damaged:
You see, search engines like Google invested tons of money in their servers. And they really care about their server resources. So Google normally labels websites with something they call: Page Quality Rating Guideline. They go from the Lowest to the Highest PQ Rating. You can see the image below:
3️⃣. Money wasted:
This is one of the most important consequences to some website owners, if not the most important consequence. Because there is nothing worse than wasting money on something that will never work, now, you don’t blame SEO on this; you blame your SEO executioner because this person is responsible, not SEO.
4️⃣. Website rankings:
Do not misunderstand SEO as only for search engine rankings. Better rankings on search engines should be a consequence of a good SEO strategy, but it is not the sole goal of SEO. Because SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, yes, it implies organic traffic but also the loading speed of web pages that, for example, will be used as landing Pages for PPC campaigns or website responsiveness, which will serve a better user experience for people using mobile devices, among other things.
5️⃣. Security vulnerabilities:
Yes, if your SEO guy is using Blackhat techniques or the person is not well aware of the vulnerabilities around, he might be a door for hackers to damage your website and do other unethical things. So, avoiding such Blackhat practices and knowing how to defend your side from them is necessary. So this dark consequence is no less important than the other ones above.
— Bonus🤣
You need to be on Google’s first page👎🏿
YOu don’t need to be on the first page to drive organic traffic to your site; sometimes, people ignore first-page results and move to the next until they find the title that offers the answering to their queries.
Yes, if you are on the first page is great, but the other pages also bring good traffic. So do not focus only on rankings; focus on quality content that will do wonders.
The Misconception of SEO
You can’t imagine how many people claim to be SEO experts when they are scaring companies from using SEO as part of their marketing efforts. So in this part, the misconception is on the SEO guys´ side.
Some SEO guys think that SEO is just about keywords, backlinks, and traffic. They know nothing about E.E.A.T., C.W.V. Content helpfulness; no, they pomp articles and backlinks into the sites they manage, hoping that someday some traffic will come. And the sad truth is, it never comes.
You won’t believe this, but sometimes they see little traffic coming in, and they go, “wow”, but after a few weeks, it disappears, never returning.
So, why is this thing happening?
Let me show you ten misconceptions some SEOs have about SEO. Yes, you need to be aware of this because this will give you insights when hiring an SEO for your website.
1️⃣. Keyword percentage improves rankings:
Some SEOs tend to believe that using target keywords at a certain percentage of the content will boost search rankings. This is wrong. Yes, there is a need or certain keywords to be distributed along a page, but the focus should never be on the percentage but on their consistency and relevancy.
2️⃣. Meta tags aren’t important:
They are very important. Think about performing a search on Google about how to fix your tracking, and among the results; you see one title saying: what is tracking? And in another one, Learn to fix your website tracking!
Which one will you click first? Surely the more relevant to your search. This is just one simple example, but the reality is that using meta tags are the magnets that appear on search results that will drive people to your website, therefore helping to increase your Click Tru Rate signals on search engines.
3️⃣. Quantity over quality for backlinks:
What a common mistake this is! A few months ago, a CMO friend of mine told me, “I just bought 10.000 backlinks for 50 dollars”. My reaction was; why did you do such a thing? It is better to have one backlink from a reputable website related to your industry than 1000 backlinks from any website.
Plus, if you need to pay for backlinks, then your content is not worth naturally linking to it. So you need to fix that.
4️⃣. Content length equals better rankings:
Note this down, please; there is no fixed content length for better rankings. Yes, we must write comprehensive content to increase the chances of ranking better on search result pages. Still, we should always focus on providing helpful content and an excellent structure and never on a set word count.
Because surely, when we aim for quality and comprehensiveness, our article will never be insufficient.
Focusing on your audience’s needs will give you a good starting point.
5️⃣. Social media has no impact on search engine optimization:
It does since SEO performance is mainly based on metrics and signals. Social media signals play an important role because they send engagement signals to search engines that might be interpreted as good content on the webpage.
Sometimes, even if the page is not fully optimized, but its main content is good, more people will interact with the page, share it, and bookmark it. This alone will be enough for search engines to consider that the page deserves better rankings on the SERP.
6️⃣. Duplicate content results in penalties:
This is a very common misconception. Duplicate content will never lead to penalties. Yes, duplicate content can indeed confuse search engines’ crawlers when determining which page to rank when the content is found on different pages. But it doesn’t lead to direct penalties.
It will lead to lowering the page quality, but this is not a penalty; it is more like; ignoring the page kind of thing. However, creating unique and high-quality content will always work for better SEO.
7️⃣. SEO is a one-time effort:
Oh no, far from being true. SEO is a process requiring continuous dedication, monitoring and effort and starting from the fact that Google, the main search engine, constantly makes algorithm changes.
This alone forces us SEO consultants to regularly update and optimize our content, monitor performance and adjust our strategies. This is the only way for maintaining and improving our search rankings.
8️⃣. H1 tags don’t matter:
H1 tags are the topic direction pointers on any web page. And it works for both human users and search engine crawler users. H1 tags help these algorithms and human users to understand the main content’s topic of a page. In fact, sometimes, Google will ignore what you added as a meta title and will use the H1 tag instead.
Doing this tells you to “fix your meta title to be more related to the main content”.
9️⃣. Fast results are guaranteed:
No, they are not fast; you can say, well, they are guaranteed, and in a certain way, they are. But this is a long-term strategy when it comes to more organic traffic as a result of SEO. It can take time to see significant improvements in rankings and traffic. Patience and persistence are key. Now, when it comes to improving the loading speeds of your website as a whole, the results are fast, and you can see the improvement in real time.
But, again, regarding search engine rankings, it’s unlikely to see immediate results, especially when aiming to rank with more competitive keywords.
🔟. Black hat SEO techniques are effective:
Remember what I said earlier about Blackhat techniques for SEO: they are dangerous and not worthy. You will do more damage to your site than good.
Let me tell you now about the common blackhat practices certain Search Engine “Optimizators” engage with:
- Keyword stuffing: Old practice that some SEOs used to try to manipulate search engines into ranking a web page better. I said old because it is, but the sad reality is that some still think it works.
- Spamming: If you have a page on your site where people can leave a comment, you might have seen totally fake comments, but they link to another site. That is very spammy just because they think that a backlink like that will give them some link equity. Wrong👎🏿 !!!
- Building linkwheels: This is another way of calling PBNs or Private Blog Networks of websites that are linked to each other, aiming to manipulate search engine rankings. Again, Wrong👎🏿 !!!
- Linkfarms: Similar to PBNs, this involves creating many low-quality websites to generate target website backlinks.
- Selling links: Yes, this is Wrong👎🏿too !!! If you have a site with the word guest post accepted, you better remove it because it is a clear sign of backlink manipulation, and Uncle Google hates it.
- Buying links: Opposite to the above, instead of selling links, you pay for them. Which is also link manipulation. One of the worse things that can happen to a site is that Google catches it, having manipulated its backlink profile.
This video offers some other misconceptions that I am not mentioning but are also valid and interesting:
Conclusion
After reading the article, you can discern that not everything golden is Gold; this implies that not every individual who claims to be an SEO expert truly possesses the necessary skills and knowledge.
To summarise, you need to keep your eyes on the SEO strategies implemented on your site; they need to be the best practices for SEO and always ethical.
The pros of doing SEO rights are:
- You will not waste your time.
- The reputation of your site will get better and not worse.
- The Return On Invested money will always be positive.
- Better website rankings and long-lasting.
- Your site will be less vulnerable to hacker attacks.
Remember, if you need a professional SEO audit to determine where your website is in terms of SEO performance, leave a comment below, and we will be happy to assist you.
