The Great SEO Myth: When Hunting Perfection is an Imperfect Aim

Often, website owners believe perfection is the goal of SEO, so they optimize every aspect of their website.

The truth is that chasing perfection in SEO can be an imperfect strategy.

This article examines the great SEO myth of perfection and why it’s crucial to focus on the most critical SEO issues first.

The Myth of SEO Perfection

The idea that SEO is all about perfection is a myth.

To achieve the highest search engine rankings, website owners believe they must optimise every aspect of their website.

Optimising your website for search engines is important, but striving for perfection can be detrimental. Investing excessive time in improving your URL structure may not result in significant improvements in search engine rankings.

Instead, you should focus on the SEO issues that can really impact your website’s performance.

Least Important SEO Issues

While all SEO issues should be addressed to some degree, some issues are considered to be less important than others. For example:

Keyword density: In the past, keyword density was considered an important ranking factor, but today, search engines focus more on the overall relevance and quality of the content.

H1 tag usage: While using H1 tags to indicate the main heading of a page is best practice, it’s not a major ranking factor for search engines.

Meta keywords: A great example of something that search engines no longer use at all.

Focusing on less important SEO issues can take up time and resources better spent on addressing issues that will move the dial on your results.

Important SEO Issues

Which SEO issues should you prioritise? A few examples:

Backlinks: The importance of backlinks cannot be overstated. Your search engine ranking can be improved by backlinks from high-quality relevant websites.

Content quality and relevance: SEO success depends on high-quality, relevant content. Content must be original, engaging, and valuable to users.

Mobile-friendly: You must make your website mobile-friendly to be successful with the majority of internet users using mobile devices. The site should load quickly on mobile devices and be easy to navigate.

Page speed: Having slow-loading pages can harm your search engine ranking and result in a poor user experience. Optimising your website’s page speed will ensure that your pages load quickly.

Most Critical SEO Issues

Many SEO problems can prevent a website or web page from ranking at all on search engine results pages. Here are just 6 issues:

Robots.txt blocking all search engines: Misconfigured robots.txt files prevent search engines from crawling a website, preventing it from ranking.

Noindex meta tag: Pages with the “noindex” meta tag won’t be indexed by search engines, so they won’t appear in SERPs.

Server errors: Search engines cannot crawl and index websites that are down or not responding due to server errors such as 5xx errors.

Duplicate content: It is possible for duplicate content to rank poorly if search engines cannot distinguish between versions.

Manual penalty: A manual penalty can result in a website being removed completely from Google’s search results. See Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Malware or hacking: Websites that have been hacked or contain malware may not appear in search results if they have been flagged as unsafe.

The above issues should be given your full attention, ASAP.

Conclusion

While it’s important to optimise your website for search engines, striving for perfection in every aspect of your website is daft. No site is flawless. Instead, focus on the most critical SEO issues first, such as content quality, mobile-friendly sites, decent page speed, and quality backlinks. By prioritising these critical SEO issues, you can improve your website’s SEO and results while keeping your users happy.