Search engine optimization or ‘SEO’ as it is known abbreviated is a big talking point online because it is a huge factor which determines how much traffic every website on the entire internet gets. Therefore, a big deal is made about it with ways of how to improve your website’s SEO, your article’s SEO and so on so you can rank higher organically on search engines. The problem with SEO, though, is that it is commonly misunderstood. For this reason, here are the main misconception people take for true of SEO so you can make sure to not go down the same road as others into believing something which simply is not true.

#1 SEO Submissions

It is true that when you first create a website, you need to tell the main search engines that your website exists so that when the search engines crawls through the internet, your website will be added to the millions for the search engines to crawl. The misconception with this is that you do not need to pay someone else to complete this service for you: especially the websites that tell you that they will submit your website to over 100+ search engines and improve your SEO score dramatically.

When it comes to starting a website, talking from experience, all you really need to do is submit your website to the big three: Google, Yahoo and Bing. Each of these search engines have dedicated pages to submit a URL and once you have done that, that is literally it! Nothing more for you to do in terms of submission.

#2 Keyword Stuffing

There are many articles that state if a blogger stuffs their article with keywords over and over again throughout the article, it will help to improve the SEO score of that article…this is wrong. Keyword stuffing decreases the readability of your article and the web users will hate you for doing this. As well as this, Google and other search engines have very clever algorithms and engines to determine if an article has been purposely stuffed with keywords to gain cheaper SEO benefits. If they catch you doing this, which is very likely, your whole website will suffer. For this reaosn, stay on topic and speak naturally and this should be enough to provide a safe level of keyword dense content for search engines to process.

#3 Guest Post Linking

Again, Google and other search engines are getting very clever at determining just exactly what is forced and not forced on the internet in terms of keyword stuffing and linking too. Guest posts are very popular where freelancers blog on a certain website in order to get a dofollow link back to this website at the end, in the hope that this external link back to their website will improve their website’s SEO. However, this is not a natural link and search engines can tell this. A great example of this happening is with one of my websites, where I now get around 2-3 emails a week from freelancers who guest blogged for me years ago telling me to remove the link I have going to their website – the hope being that if the link is removed, the SEO penalties search engines have put on their website are lifted.