As a consultant I hear a lot about social media and SEO: at conferences, from marketers, by\u00a0entrepreneurs. And unfortunately, while well-intentioned\u00a0there is a fair amount of misinformation that continues to spread.<\/p>\n
So today let\u2019s debunk some common SEO and social media myths that continue to perpetuate:<\/p>\n
Myth 1: meta keywords are important to SEO<\/strong><\/p>\n I know, I know, who still thinks this? Trust me, it is still lingering. And it frustrates me a lot because\u00a0Google even\u00a0has a blog post\u00a0that you only need to read the title of to get:\u00a0Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.<\/p>\n Sadly it is not just marketers who keep insisting we \u201coptimize the meta keywords\u201d on pages, it is web designers too. I\u2019ve seen enough new websites where the design team launches it and takes the time to flesh out meta keywords\u00a0but doesn\u2019t even bother<\/em>\u00a0with the title tag or meta description. It is actually in my experience the rare web designer who considers search. Sad.<\/p>\n Myth 2: age of website and age of links are factors for SEO<\/strong><\/p>\n Rand Fishkin\u00a0does a good job\u00a0debunking this one and I\u2019m inclined to agree. There are enough new sites (i.e.\u00a0Quora) that do well in SERPs and have a link profile that\u2019s a lot fresher than older sites. I\u2019ve seen it in my own experience marketing start-ups. Also logically it doesn\u2019t make sense for any of the engines to do this: it would tilt the web in favor of legacy sites and links and not inspire fresh content to be created. And fresh content makes the engines\u00a0far<\/em>\u00a0more\u00a0valuable than old links.<\/p>\n Myth 3: blogs \/ self-hosted websites are dead<\/strong><\/p>\n Another one that continues to propagate is that self-hosted web properties \/ communities are dead. This one is just silly. We share plenty of examples of what happens when you\u00a0yield your presence\u00a0to the stream, and the people\u00a0propagating\u00a0the notion that self-publishing is dead usually have motivations behind it. Savvy digital marketers understand you need to\u00a0self-publish forever. In fact, I\u2019ll say the opposite of dead: it\u2019s never been a better time to\u00a0start a blog.<\/p>\n Myth 4: we suffer from information overload<\/strong><\/p>\n Anyone who spouts this one simply does a poor job at staying organized or isn\u2019t managing their RSS reader, email inbox, or social client well. Louis Gray\u00a0does a great job\u00a0debunking this. And anyway, the reality is you don\u2019t\u00a0need<\/em>\u00a0to read\u00a0everything<\/em>\u00a0that happens in a given industry. Setup the right filtering, selectively choose who and what sites you opt into, setup the right media monitoring and ruthlessly unsubscribe \/ unfriend \/ unfollow the junk.<\/p>\n Myth 5: you shouldn\u2019t automate syndication of micro content<\/strong><\/p>\n This one always gets people up in arms. They proclaim you can\u2019t automate Twitter. Even a little bit. Anywhere. Of course, this is silly: there is no \u201cright\u201d or \u201cwrong\u201d use of Twitter or any social network so long as it\u2019s useful and makes sense to users. Any given post syndicated via\u00a0Seth\u2019s blog auto feed\u00a0gets more ReTweets than most\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0people on Twitter. You don\u2019t even have to be Seth Godin to do this:\u00a0I decided to\u00a0conduct an experiment\u00a0and create a feed for content instead of sending it through a person and the opt-in rate was the same. Automation aside, if what you\u2019re doing is valuable\u00a0people<\/em>\u00a0don\u2019t care how it\u2019s done even if pundits complain.<\/p>\n Myth 6: social media is difficult \/ impossible to measure<\/strong><\/p>\n Ummmm, ok. The real problem here isn\u2019t that social media is difficult to measure. The problem is the people saying this generally aren\u2019t fluent in\u00a0any<\/em>\u00a0online marketing metrics. They immediately call into question social channels, but I\u2019m willing to bet if you push these people on how their existing website performs they won\u2019t be able to tell you. Or if they can, they\u2019re not actually using that\u00a0data to make decisions. This stuff is very possible to measure (we do it for all our clients at\u00a0LEWIS) and\u00a0everyone can get to conversion.<\/p>\n Myth 7: our customers don\u2019t use social\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve actually heard this one. In 2011. Really. Do we even need to comment on this?\u00a017.1 billion\u00a0searches monthly (social content taps this\u00a0if you\u2019re smart). More than\u00a0800 million\u00a0users on Facebook alone. But this is silly anyway, generally people saying this haven\u2019t even polled their own customers to find out. Or researched their category in social. Or considered trying to be the leader in their category in the space and attract new audiences. Usually they are just people who are\u00a0afraid of change.<\/p>\n This is, of course, just a short list. Comments are open: what myths do you keep hearing that should be debunked?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a consultant I hear a lot about social media and SEO: at conferences, from marketers, by\u00a0entrepreneurs. And unfortunately, while … <\/p>\n