1. The age of the website.

An age old discussion is whether Google actually cares about the age of your website and the length of time that it has actually been resisted with search engines. We can categorically say that the age of your website has no significance to how search engines rank you within the search engine rankings.

You may however have benefited from the length of time that you had been practicing good quality SEO techniques on the site, but the site age itself doesn’t come into it.

2. Using the Meta Keywords tag.

A websites keyword meta tag used to be key when defining the keywords and search terms that you wanted your website to be found for, however since around 2009 the main search engines have abandoned it after many years of abuse.

Google, Yahoo and Bing all declared that they no longer utilised the keyword meta tag back in 2009. So there is now no correlation between the keywords you stuff into your keyword meta tag and your search engine rank.

3. Social Media counters on your website.

Social Media counters have been available and used on websites for several years now and can display how many likes or shares a particular piece of content or post has had on the site.

The fact that you have a social media counter on your site however does not have any bearing on how well your website does in search engines.

There could however be a positive outcome as a result of the traffic generated from the shares acting on your content and your brand and in turn having a positive impact on your search engine rankings.

4. Paid advertising.

Paid advertising in the form of search engines or social media is a great way to launch a campaign or to advertise your business, however it does not have a direct effect on your website SEO.

Yes, paid search will most definitely give you a boost and can aid traffic to your website or designated landing page, but in the grand scheme of things it does not improve your website rankings in search engines.

5. Whether you use Google services.

It was often thought that by using Googles own products your website would stand a better chance of moving up the listings and that it would have a positive impact on the SEO of your website, this is just not the case.

Obviously there are huge benefits of actually using Google products and they are free and offer some amazing services, but if you are looking to utilise your loyalty to Google in order to improve the SEO of your website then this is a fruitful exercise.

These are just a few of many misconceptions about what can actually directly affect on your websites SEO.

For more information or guidance on Search Engine Optimisation and Website Improvements please get in touch with UMIS Consultancy on: 0845 25 75 011