Lately we’ve received a lot of calls and emails from people looking for help with their current website and “SEO.”  So we figured this would be a great time to separate the myths from realities when it comes to the term SEO.

SEO Lies Explained

If you think there’s a “magic formula” or “silver bullet” when it comes to getting your website found online, think again.  Without knowing it, you’ve already bought into the first (and oldest) myth in the business.

This one has been around forever, and is spread by folks wanting to charge you thousands of dollars to “improve” your SEO.  And often enough, if you ask them how they’ll do it, the typical answer is…

leave that to us.

Yeah, right.

If someone approaches you about SEO and they can’t even explain the basics of what they’ll do for you, it’s good advice to move on and talk to someone else.

Another prevalent myth is that SEO work is very hard. As in, super complicated. Actually, it’s far from it.

Good SEO work, truth be told, is actually very boring stuff.  Sort of like repeating basic steps, over, and over, and over. And that’s probably one of the reasons why so few people have good SEO principles on (and off) their website.

When you come down to it, good SEO principles aren’t very exciting.  Or flashy.

But they do work.

What is “Good” SEO?

Understand that in today’s world, it’s more about what’s happening OFF your site then what’s ON your site.  If I had to put a percentage on it, the factors you can control on your site probably amount to 15 to 20% importance.

The offsite factors amount for the remaining 80 to 85%.

When we use the term “good” we mean items that were done properly with respect to your website.  The onsite stuff involves:

1. Title Tag
2. Meta Description
3. Effective Keywords (including geo-targeting)
4. Use of sitemaps

To help simplify some of the other issues, here’s a quick checklist of items to address when it comes to offsite SEO:

1. Number of backlinks to your site
2. Quality of backlinks
3. Anchor Text pointing to your site
4. Social Media sites pointing to your site
5. Social Content Sharing sites with your content published there
6. Quality of sites that you currently link to
7. Number of comments on your site
8. Use of video (on or offsite)

That’s a good start right there.  These items are not necessarily listed in order of importance.  Some of the items take minutes to fix.  Others are issues you’ll be working on for a long time.

My rule of thumb?  Take care of the tasks that are quicker to complete before moving on to the others.  And having a checklist certainly helps.

If you have any questions about this article, or would like us to complete a 10 Point Analysis of your site, just post a comment below and we’ll check it out as soon as we’re able.

Next Steps…

Any questions?  Comments?  Did we hit a nerve?

Drop us a line by leaving a comment.  We will reply (here, and by email if you’d like) as soon as we’re able.  And if there’s a topic you want us to discuss, let us know.

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