There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.

Here is an example: Let’s assume you make a change to your website content. Maybe after a few days you notice that your Google ranking for a certain keyword has altered. Now, it would be natural for you to assume that your content change had led to change in ranking. However, it may not be true. Your ranking could have changed due to several reasons, and may have absolutely nothing to do with the changes made to the content.

Of course, this action of mixing up the cause and effect is a common error on the part of new SEOs. Well, if it were limited to just their work, I wouldn’t really mind it. But these guys are clueless and many a times spread their ignorance to other newbies on blogs and forums and create a ripple effect of newer myths. Here, I am making an attempt to discuss and clear the top 10 organic SEO myths:

Organic SEO Myth 1: You must submit your website URL to search engines. Once upon a time, this could have been the "in" thing. But since the past 5-6 years it has become unnecessary.

Organic SEO Myth 2: In order to get better ranking, you absolutely need a Google Sitemap. It’s partially correct. However, if you have built your site properly (ensured its crawler-friendly) you don’t require a Google Sitemap. That being said, having one won’t hurt you and you can even use other Webmaster Central tools offered by Google, but this doesn’t guarantee higher ranking.

Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website rankings. Only update your website content it is necessary and not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that haven’t been updated in years!

Organic SEO Myth 4: PPC (pay per click) ads can help or hurt rankings. What amuses me most is that several people believe that participating in Google AdWords campaigns will hurt their organic SEO ranking, while many other believe that PPC will spike the traffic and up the ranking. All I can say is that neither of this is true!

Organic SEO Myth 5: Not following guidelines on Google will ban your website. Google’s guidelines are common sense but not mandatory. It’s advisable to read them, however just don’t do any thing purely for search engines and you’ll be fine.

Organic SEO Myth 6: Buying links can lead to banning of your website. It is partially true again. Google doesn’t like to count paid links as votes for a website page. Mostly Google is unable to find out if the links are paid for, but even if it does, it won’t count the links. Google won’t ban your website in any case. A quick update, Google has made it easier to report paid links in sites that are unrelated to your site. Thought the reasoning is yet unclear and best practice should tell you don’t buy links in unrelated site to your theme.

Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google positioning without H1 but they certainly don’t hurt so use H tags correctly.

Organic SEO Myth 8: Meta keywords tag need to be used on your page. The fact is that a Meta keyword tag was introduced to use keywords that are NOT on the site page already! However, this tag is ignored by Google in any case.

Organic SEO Myth 9: The SEO copy should be 250 words in length. 250 words is not really an optimal number nor is it specific for SEO rankings. Easily, 250 words allow one to write a good marketing copy and can be optimized for 3-5 main key phrases. However, shorter SEO copies work just as well.

Organic SEO Myth 10: Your pages should be optimized for the long tail keywords. This is not true. Nowadays, long-tail keyword phrases are no longer effective as not many pages use them and not many people search using long tails. You can include these keywords in blogs or even an article, but that is not really optimization.

Remember don’t go spreading any SEO myths that you believe may be true. Test it yourself several times on different websites before reaching any conclusion as there are other factors involved as well.

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