Major Misconceptions About SEO In 2015

It’s hard to think of other industries that have been subject to more rapid change or volatileswingsin accepted practices than SEO.  Because of the fast-changing nature of Internet whims, coupled with SEO’s reliance on the main search engines (ahem, Google) SEO marketers are forever playing a game of catch-up.

Just when you think you’ve learned all the rules, someone comes along to rewrite them.  (Again)

Unfortunately, this tends to lead to bloggers -eager for attention- to declare things dead and/or out of date well before they should be ignored.  So for this post, we’re going to address a few techniques that have previously been tossed off the SEO cliff, but in actuality, are not quite dead yet.

Four SEO “Deaths” Which Are Greatly Exaggerated

1 – Keywords are dead.

You might think life would be easier without keywords, and while some of us would like to see keywords go away as a search focus, we’re nowhere near that point yet.  Google’s recent changeover to more heuristic (aka natural-language) search parsing has depreciated keywords, but it hasn’t undone them completely.

What that means is keyword use should shift to become much more audience-focused.  If your audience is typing questions into Google (yes they are), you should be trying to anticipate those questions and pick keywords to match.  Keywords are no longer a static or arbitrary search feature.  Rather, they’re how Google matches up websites to the presumed intent of the searcher.

Accurately anticipate the questions your audience is likely to ask, and you can be there first with authoritative answers.

2 – Guest blogging is dead.

About a year ago, there was a big kerfuffle in the SEO community over an article that proclaimed guest blogging was worthless.  Although the writer eventually backpedaled from that one, we feel it’s important to address because guest blogging can still be an excellent cross-pollinizing technique.

The key (and this is increasingly true for all content) is that the blogs have to be good.  If you’re going to get a guest blogger, make sure they’re committed to producing a quality article and (we can’t emphasize this next one enough) that they’re not going to use it as a platform for shameless self-promotion.

The problem with guest blogging is all the bad posts that are being created.  Give your guest bloggers the same attention you’d give your own content, and .

3 – Authoritative linking is dead.

We’ve noticed a disturbing trend with websites being stingy about, or even outright withholding, direct links to outside authoritative sources.  Why? The common fear is that website visitors will click their way off the site, never to return.

But ask yourself, what sites are most valuable to you?  Many are likely to be ones that offer insight about other tools, resources, or information that is on other sites.  Trust your content, trust your users, and share links freely.  Don’t squelch your content by denying links, especially when they’re your best supporting evidence.  By sharing links, you’re increasing the perception of your own authority as well.  Referencing a specific number or statistic but neglecting to include a link to your source can be viewed as a big red flag by skeptical visitors.

Besides, Google still monitors outside links, and they’re interested in promoting pages that are the most valuable to searchers.  As a result, outside links can often provide a small boost to websites that inspire a lot of traffic between important resources.

4 – Meta-tagging is dead.

This one goes hand-in-hand with the belief that keywords have become useless.  Yes, we acknowledge that Google is no longer relying as heavily on your meta-tags.  But should you really ignore them entirely?  We don’t think so.

Why? Because the meta-text is still used in a variety of applications, and is often plucked out by search engines to be the sample/preview of your web page.  Forgetting to complete meta-tags reduces the information available to both search spiders and users in deciding which websites are most relevant.

In short; be careful not to jump on too many reactionary hype trains.  There’s no need to retire techniques which still have plenty of juice, just because they’ve become a bit depreciated.  They still have their uses.