Author: Daniel Page

Like any field with a technical aspect, search engine optimization plays host to a wide range of different misconceptions, half-truths, and falsehoods.  

With digital marketing in particular, this problem is exacerbated by the fluid and rapidly-changing nature of both search and the Internet itself.

What held true last year might not necessarily be valid next year; this year’s tactics could end up obsolete with a single update to Google’s algorithms.

These tall tales – and there are many of them – range in veracity from “somewhat true” to “less grounded than the flat-Earth theory.”

Although Google’s algorithms don’t seem to have much use for meta descriptions anymore, that doesn’t make them any less valuable to you as a content creator.

Often, a meta description is the first thing a user will see of your site; it’s quite literally the first impression you’ll make on your readers. You need make sure it’s well-written.

Otherwise, you’re very likely to miss out on a significant amount of traffic.

If you’ve worked in marketing, you’ve likely seen a lot of jargon. Many industries are the same. This shouldn’t surprise you.

Often, jargon is the best way to simplify complex topics. It makes them easier to explain. For that reason, I’m not entirely against its use, nor do I deny its efficacy given the right circumstances.

The problem with jargon is that when overused – or repeatedly misused – its meaning tends to grow distorted over time. It becomes a buzzword; an empty, meaningless propaganda phrase which is more a sign of laziness than knowledge. While jargon is best used sparingly, buzzwords should be avoided at all costs.

There’s a good chance that you’re going to use images at one point or another, regardless of the website you run or the publication you manage.

We’re a very visual society these days, after all; a few well-placed pictures can drastically improve the look, feel, and readability of a site. Of course, if you fail to properly optimize these images, you’re going to be losing out.

It should be clear to anyone with more than a passing interest in search engine optimization that it favors long-term planning and hard work over easy, short-term gain. If you need any proof of this, you need look no further than last year’s Penguin 2.0 update and how hard it hit websites that used questionable (yet effective) optimization techniques like paid links, content networks, and link schemes. What’s one thing all those strategies shared in common?

They were easy. They required minimal work on the part of the webmaster and gave immediate returns.

As I’m certain many of you are already aware, Google recently acquired Deepmind, an artificial intelligence firm with a focus on machine learning.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the corporation is looking to augment its new army of robots with better intelligence (all the better to kick off the machine uprising with?).

After all, this purchase came directly on the tail end of a flurry of robotics acquisitions, of which Boston Dynamics was the capstone. And while smart robots could certainly be in Google’s future, that isn’t the reason Google bought the startup.

See, what a lot of people appear to have forgotten in light of Google’s recent innovations and inventions is that it is, at its core, about search.