Insight into Top 3 Common Misconceptions about On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO collectively represents all the elements of a web page that affect its search engine rankings and the biggest misconception among most of the new webmasters, bloggers, as well as even SEO analysts is that building powerful links is the only way to gain high SERPs. In reality, it’s totally a myth, and the SERP of a page is heavily dependent upon On-page factors.

Myth 1: On-Page SEO is Not as Important as Off-Page SEO

Just think about it – if that was really the case, then why on earth would Google really invest the Panda algorithm before Penguin? As they rightly say “Content is King”, the contents of the web page play a big role in its ranking, and more so, the presentation of those contents is what really matters the most. Going by the stats, On-Page SEO has 43% importance, as opposed to 57% off-page SEO in determining the SERP of a web page.

But, of course, if you go wrong in those 43%, then even with the most powerful backlinks, the 57% off-page SEO efforts won’t ever pay off!

Click here to read more SEO tips, and check out the latest happenings in the SEO world if you’re just getting started.

Myth 2: Google measures the Title by Character Limits

Well, if you had been giving LARGE sized titles and increasing its length hoping that Google would love it, then guess what – here’s some real bad news for you – Google actually measures title tags by pixels NOT by character count – oops!

So, you should be ideally using Arial font with size 12, because that’s what Google bots use too, and then import title tag data from a good SEO tool into excel sheet and analyse the same.

Now, Google has a 520px cut-off limit, and that’s what you should set the column width of your excel sheet to, when you try to analyse the effectiveness of your title tags.

Remember, 520px is the maximum limit, but your titles should be under 350px either, because that’s considered too short by Google. Translating that in terms of text characters, it should have about 50-64 characters.

Myth 3: Panda Penalty is Only the End Result of Lot of Duplicate Content

While it’s true that copying a bit of content won’t really result in a Panda penalty, and scraping loads of content will, it’s not a golden rule that Panda penalty will be imposed only due to dupe content issues. The quality of content, bounce rate, and host of other factors play a major role. So, you need to focus on quality of content, and above all, adding value to the users.

So, don’t commit these blunders when you try to do On-Page SEO, and don’t go frenzy about building backlinks without paying due attention to optimizing your web pages first, if you really want to get good results.

Author Bio

Criss Derek is an Internet marketing and SEO specialist who has been working in the SEO industry for past 7 years, and he has terrific experience of optimizing over 1300 websites to date.