Shopify SEO Course ↗️ > Unit 1 > Lesson 3 > SEO Myths
Before we dive into the tactics of search engine optimization you need to know, let’s expunge common SEO myths you may have or will hear when learning about SEO. Myths that could take you off track for optimizing your website for search engines.
SEO isn’t difficult. It is time-consuming when you do it right, but if you’re willing to make an effort into optimizing your website for search results, the benefit to your business will be long term. SEO isn’t something that only helps you as you are doing it – it is something that can help you position your website on the first page of search results for many years to come.
It’s not a quick process, as you won’t find yourself on the first page of search results overnight, but rather something you do for the long haul. As you continue to invest more time into SEO, you will continue to see results and maintain them so that you don’t eventually get outranked buy your competitors.
In this course, you will learn how to optimize your website for keywords and phrases that you would like to rank higher for in search results. After reading the advice in this course, you may be tempted to overuse your target keywords and phrases, but this would be a mistake.
Instead of over optimizing for a specific keyword or phrase, the goal is to optimize for a specific keyword or phrase along with related keywords and phrases. This approach will help you reach more people as different searchers will use different search terms. We’ll cover how to find related keywords in the next module.
Links have always been considered one of the top ranking factors that search engines use to determine the order of web pages that appear in search results for specific keywords and phrases. However, links are only one of many ranking signals search engines like Google uses. Although not all ranking signals are shared outside of each search engine’s main headquarters, we will help you utilize many of them in the best way possible to help you rank higher in search engines throughout this course.
These ranking signals (also referred to as ranking factors) include, but are not limited to, the age of your website’s domain, your website’s architecture, how well your website performs on desktop and mobile browsers, and social mentions.
If you’ve researched search engine optimization companies, you’ve likely come across both expensive and inexpensive services. In particular, you probably came across services that offer to build links to your website for a cost that looks too good to be true compared to other pricier agencies and consultants. And that’s what they are – too good to be true.
You can’t buy bulk packages of links and expect to rank higher in search results because many bulk link building or automated link building services are only going to net you cheap links. Links that could appear spammy in the eyes of search engines and ultimately costing you in the form of penalties and manual actions.
While content marketing – the art of creating content to market your website – is extremely valuable to search engine optimization, it isn’t the ultimate goal. The goal of content marketing, where SEO is concerned, is to create content that helps you attract links from other websites. Hence, creating content and publishing it on your website is only half the battle. The other half, if you want to rank higher in search results, is to make sure that your content is generating links.
We will dive into how to create the content that helps you get great links later in this course. For now, just realize that creating great content is not the end all tactic for effective search engine optimization.
Similar to content marketing, social media is not the end all tactic of search engine optimization. It can help you in a variety of ways, such as giving your website additional visibility in search results through the creation of profiles on the social media networks or helping you connect with potential website owners who would want to link to your website. Social media shares have also been identified as part of the ranking signals search engines use to determine the authority of a website. Hence, the more people you can get talking about your website, the better. Don’t consider it a replacement for a strong search engine optimization campaign, but rather an accessory to it.
Researching the search engine optimization tactics of your competitors can be a great way to come up with ideas on what keywords and phrases to focus upon, where to get links, and what type of content to create to attract links. But just because a competitor who is ranking higher in search results has used a particular tactic doesn’t mean you should too. It’s important to identify quality from quantity, even when researching your competitors. That way, you can skip the low-quality tactics and focus on those that will build a strong foundation for your website’s search engine optimization. We’ll point out both good and bad opportunities throughout the course.
Giles Thomas
CEOOptimize your Shopify conversion rates. 5 lesson course, learn 51 ecommerce best practices to get more visitors to buy.
