For the vast majority of websites out there, the number one way they will gain traffic will be through search engine optimisation: the process of getting your website to rank highly on organic search results for search engines. If you can get a website good SEO, then the possibility for traffic in the long term is very likely.

However, there are a lot of bloggers out there that are put off with making websites with good SEO, thinking it is too hard or will not work and provide the results that SEO claims to produce. With this, here are two myths debunked about SEO.

#1 When Google Updated Their SEO, I Will Lose Traffic

Wrong!

The updates Google makes to the algorithms which determine the search ranking of websites are done to not penalise those that perform good SEO but those that try to ‘con’ Google and cheat SEO. By this, there are many websites out there that perform tricks to make Google believe their articles have good SEO, such as:

• Extremely dense keywords in the articles.
• Many links inside the article.
• Poor quality content in general.
• Content copied or ‘partially’ copied from other websites.

Due to this, Google updates how they rank websites so that those that try to cheat Google get penalised and lose traffic while those that do SEO the correct way still maintain their traffic (or even get a slightly boost). Therefore, if you are not trying to cheat Google when doing SEO, you should have nothing to worry about. Make high quality articles, have 1-2 internal links in them and make sure you are providing something actually useful to web users.

#2 SEO Doesn’t Take Too Long

Well, wrong but this one is a little more grey.

I say that this is a ‘grey’ area because it depends how large a website you have. If you have a very high pagerank and are getting hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, then the time between getting an article published and seeing the SEO benefits of that article will be much less than a website that is getting thousands of visitors a month and has a low pagerank.

To give you some actual figures, a start up website will only start to see the true results of SEO around 9-12 months later. For websites that are up and running already, the figure will be more like 1-3 months.

If you are really successful, it could be within the month of posting the article.

However, for the majority, this should make it clear that SEO does take a long time…a long time to see the results come in. If you want to make sure you are getting good consistant levels of traffic, you will find yourself publishing many articles a week with no gain in traffic. But, this will happen up and until SEO starts to kick into the articles you publish.