Digital Envy

SEO Myth: You Must Submit Your Site

At least twice a week I get an email from an SEO site submission company telling me I need to pay them to submit my site to the search engines.

Seriously? No, you do not.

Now, are there times when it is good to submit your site URLs? Sure when you need the search engines to come back to the site to do things like pick up a new piece of content or re-evaluate a page, however, you never need to submit your site.

Google is advanced enough now – and especially with its status as registrar – that it can find you minutes after not only that site is live, but also when the domain is registered.

Now if you’ve been live for a few weeks and have an inbound link to the site and Google has not come by as evident by your logs it can’t hurt to submit it via Google Search Console Fetch and Render, but never ever pay someone to submit your site.

Bonus Tip: When in doubt just use Google’s URL submit form or “fetch and render/submit” in Google Search Console.

SEO Myth: Keyword Density

There was a time keyword density have some validity.

Really, if it did not work why do you think all those people were stuffing white text on white backgrounds for ranking purposes? Then Google got smarter and it did away with keyword stuffing as a viable practice and even people who got good results from applying density testing to much smaller keyword placements no longer could count on knowing what keyword density would help.

In both cases, this no longer exists.

While you can still put any word on the page too many times, there is no set range of what makes a page rank. In fact, you can find results now where the keyword does not exist in the visible portion of the page. It might be in the links or in the image tagging or somewhere else that is not part of the content it might even be a similar not exact match. This is not typical, but it does exist.

Bottom line: placing a keyword X times per page is no longer something worth spending your time on. There are far better fish to fry.

What a great Fathers Day. Really grateful for everything and knowing what is the most important things in life.

SEO Myth: Website Speed Isn’t That Important

Google said a while back that page speed is only a tie-breaker when all other factors are equal. This is one of those cases where I can say that this is not borne out in real-world testing.

Personally, I had a client increase their traffic by 150% when they cut their page speed by 50 percent. So while it is true that it acts as a tie-breaker when all things are equal it can also dramatically improve rankings when your site has a severe page speed issue.

Now when I say a page speed issue, I don’t mean you cut your 5-second site load time down to 2 seconds. I mean when you dramatically cut your page load, say a 22-second site load time down to 8 seconds, which is what happened in this case.

This means that if you can cut your website load from 22 seconds to 8 seconds as in the example, Google will likely reward you for the dramatic decrease in page load because you are now dramatically faster. This is an additional benefit of improving page speed unrelated to breaking a tie on a specific query result.