Here are the top 8 SEO myths 2019, which can ruin your online career

Myth #1. SEO is dead

In 2018-2019 all hype is about Youtube and Instagram.

And among many bloggers, SEO is “so 2005”.

But, in fact, Search Engine Optimization still has the highest ROI among all inbound channels. And content marketing in 2019 works just well. Actually, right now is the golden age of SEO.

Myth #2. You don’t need backlinks

One of the most damaging SEO myths is that “you don’t need backlinks”. Just publish your content and Google will figure it out.

I run several websites, in different niches. While of course, it’s possible to get traffic to your site without backlinks (from social media, etc), it’s almost impossible to receive Google traffic, if other sites don’t link to yours.

Myth #3. Link building is spam

Another modification of the previous myth is that “backlinks are important, but they will appear by themselves somehow”.

They won’t.

Of course, you shouldn’t apply BlackHat SEO techniques, which will ruin your online presence.

But, if you are doing outreach, quality guest posting, “skyscraper technique”, amplification – it will massively boost your SEO presence.

Myth #4. 300 word content is enough

There is a rather simplified view of SEO, and one element of it is that 300 word content is totally enough to build your search engine presence.

Or that you can just order some random quality articles on Fiverr or Upwork – and it will work just fine.

In fact, if you want to collect a lot of organic traffic, you should aim at least at 1500-2000 words of quality content.

Myth #5. Just buy backlinks…

Pat of bloggers are very suspicious about link building and another part is thinking about backlinks in terms of just buying e.g. 1000+ package on Fiverr for $5.

In fact, this kind of backlinks will do nothing in the best case scenario or severely damage your site – in the worst case.

Link building became a very expensive and difficult process, which requires a lot of outreach and amplification effort. In my experience, quality totally trumps quantity in link building. 200-300 high quality referring domains can easily outweigh thousands of poor quality PBN links.

Myth #6. Just send press-releases

While high-quality press releases still can bring some SEO value, from recent times it’s more and more limited.

Instead of sending poor quality press-releases, it’s more beneficial to focus on creating backlinks from sources with authority.

Myth #7. You can get SEO “up and running” in 1 month

This is another misunderstanding among bloggers when they create content and in a few weeks expect Google to bring thousands of visitors to their sites.

Here is the hard truth.

In recent years, SEO has become much more competitive – it takes much more time and effort to start ranking on Google.

You can start seeing the first results of your work – with great content and effective link building strategy – in at least 3-5 months.

So, SEO is essentially a long-term game.

The good part about SEO is when you finally start getting traction with Google, there comes a snowball effect: your organic keywords start to rank and you start receiving traffic even from older blogs. And then you will see that share of your Google traffic starts to grow massively.

Myth #8. I don’t care, I just share my posts on Facebook

Every medium has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Of course, Facebook can provide much more targeted and younger audience.

But, Google search has one big strength – evergreen traffic.

See, every time you post content on Facebook, it can get viral for a few hours or maybe days – but then it disappears forever.

While on Google (and other search engines), people will be able to find your content for a much longer time.

It is a concept of evergreen content – old content, which still brings traffic to your site. Evergreen content – is one of the secret ingredients for making revenue online by blogging.

To sum up

Of course, there are many more SEO myths, I just outlined the most common ones. The bottom line is, you should listen to your instincts and don’t go after the hype 🙂

Author: Andrii Gorokh- contributes to tech SEO blog – Online Hikes.