There are lots of SEO myths flying around. Some are humorous whilst some are just downright harmful.

In this short article we’ll look at several of the most interesting myths surrounding search engine optimisation. We’ll also try to debunk them so that you can get a clear idea of what this vital online marketing process actually entails.

Myth #1: SEO Doesn’t Work for Very Long

Some companies decide to try out SEO. They hand over their cash to a reputable-looking company and wait for them to perform a few actions. Inevitably, this company’s ranking will improve, and as a result they’ll experience more web traffic and perhaps even more sales. After time though, the effects wear off and the company assumes SEO to be some kind of short-term fix. They don’t bother with it again, and miss out on all of the benefits it brings.

SEO isn’t a short-term fix. It just needs to be maintained. Links can rot, search engine algorithms are prone to change and you’re likely to add pages to your website. If you don’t maintain your SEO strategy, the results will be fairly short lived.

Myth #2: SEO is a Scam

In 2007, it was easy to buy an SEO package off of eBay, or even a piece of SEO software that would do everything for you. You wouldn’t have to pay more than £10 for either of these things, and could sometimes pick them up for pennies if nobody else had bid. Of course, what you got for your money was inevitably a load of rubbish. Dreadful backlinks and spun keyword-stuffed content was all it really amounted to. Predictably, the results promised weren’t achieved, and so many people began assuming the S in SEO stood for scam.

A well-run SEO campaign is different. It focuses on quality. An expert will help you work on your site’s user experience, they’ll clean up your code, they’ll produce high quality content for you and they’ll get you some damn high-quality backlinks. The results now will be profound. SEO can be a scam, but it isn’t if you do it properly.

Myth #3: SEO is all About Tricks

Once upon a time it was easier for lazy people to cheat the system and get a site to rank. Today it’s much harder. Google constantly refines its algorithms to make them as accurate as possible. The goal is to rank quality sites near the top and punish low-quality sites. While this isn’t a perfect system yet, you won’t go very far on the web if all you’re doing is trying to cheat a system. Yes, in the past some people used tricks to get ahead of their competition, but a real SEO campaign is about making your site the best it can be. So, you know, your visitors will actually enjoy visiting it. They way the web was actually intended to be used.

Myth #4: SEO is Immoral

Some people think SEO is immoral as it involves using a cheat code to bypass the competition into first place in the search engines. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case otherwise everybody with knowledge of SEO would be filthy rich.

SEO shows you care for your site. It shows you’re willing to learn and it shows you’re concerned about your customers. Why else would you make an effort to do in-depth keyword research if you didn’t care? Why else would you pay a fortune for great quality content? SEO isn’t immoral and it isn’t unethical. If you want to talk about hacking or other blackhat techniques people use to rank highly, then yes, they may be immoral, but reputable companies such as SEO Moves go nowhere near that junk.

Myth #5: Social Media Doesn’t Have Anything to do with SEO

To be successful on the web, you’ll need to know how to navigate the social media platforms. As search engines are all about producing the best quality results, they take some notice of social media. If a post has 100 shares, it’s likely to be of higher quality than that which has 0 shares. It’s not a rule, you’ll find plenty of exceptions to that previous example, but, ultimately it’s likely to be the case.

So search engines will take note of your brand’s popularity on social media. Don’t go neglecting it if you plan to rank well for your preferred keywords.