Busting Common SEO Myths With the Worst Advice That Works
TL;DR
- You find Common SEO Myths in online advice.
- You have permission to break the rules.
- Monitor your search traffic to see what is working.
Common SEO myths confuse new bloggers. People offer guidelines but they aren’t always the best advice. Following them might stifle your writing. Let’s bust three of these misconceptions and unleash your creativity.
The topics that we are going to cover in today’s article are meta descriptions, title length, and word count. I find that my writing performs better in search when I don’t follow the best practices. It is more important to write for humans than for machines. Breaking the rules might work in your favor
What Is the Best Meta Description Length?
A meta description refers to a tag in HTML that signals to search engines what your page is about. This is usually set using an SEO WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO. It shouldn’t be something that you have to manually add by coding.
Search engines don’t always use your meta description in search snippets. Google search for example often uses relevant text from an article. It is still a good idea to use meta descriptions though as they tell search engines the topic of your writing. They may also appear when people share your articles on social media.
The suggested length is often cited as 160 characters. This is a common SEO myth. Meta descriptions can be any length. Google will truncate these descriptions if they are too long. But length is not a ranking factor.
What Is the Best Title Length?
Typically, the suggestion is 50- 70 characters. Again, this isn’t based on anything search engines have put out there as guidelines. This is because Google search will truncate long titles. That title length matters is another common SEO myth.
On Beauty of Mathematics, I often use long titles that are greater than 70 characters. But that hasn’t hurt me in the slightest. One of my most popular posts ranks at the top of a Google search for “mathematical cross stitch.”
The title is “15 Creative Mathematical Cross Stitch Patterns for Math & Science Enthusiasts.” This has a length of 77 characters. It appears truncated in search results. It works by putting the topic at the front of the title for clarity.
What Is the Best Word Count for an Article?
This is a misconception that bothers me the most as a writer. That there should be a predetermined word count to achieve better rankings. Recommended word counts are artificial. Top-ranked posts on Google could be a particular length because it is most common. The length may not be what causes that content to rank.
Here is the interesting thing. Can you rank at the top of search results for a page less than 200 words? Yes.
I am at the top of the search results for “best Numberphile videos.” This article has 34 words total.
“I’m not going to make this a very long post. Numberphile reignited my love of mathematics. This list is the 10 best videos of Numberphile sorted by year. I’d love to see your list.”
This is why word count length is a common SEO myth. Write the length that expresses everything you want to say.
Use Google Search Console to Monitor Your Search Traffic
The most important thing you can do for SEO is to play. Break all the rules that you know. See what happens. Search algorithms are a black box. We don’t know what the search ranking factors are. All published advice is guesswork. You have to determine if the evidence the authors provide is enough to convince you.
There is something that you can do. You should hook up your website to Google Search Console. It tells you about your search traffic. You will find the keywords people use to search in the analytics. As well as how many clicks your articles got. It is very informative for SEO purposes. It will tell you if what you are doing is working.
This is a topic that I want to delve into deeply for you in a future article. One thing that we need to do is measure our work using analytics. That means becoming literate in these tools. Using statistics to understand the data. This is something that we will return to again and again.
Conclusion
Common SEO myths are prevalent in advice given online. When enough people repeat something you may believe that it’s true. You don’t have to follow these rules to the tee. The truth is, there is much more room to play around. Because we don’t know how the algorithms work and we are guessing.
What SEO rules do you want to break? Share in the comments below.