Over the last 25 years or so, search engine optimization (SEO) has changed a great deal. In that time, many people have held on to false beliefs and myths that may be holding them back from reaching their true potentials. Below are five common myths surrounding SEO marketing and the evidence required to debunk them.

#1 – Google Won’t Rank Your Site Unless You Submit It

Believe it or not, there are still people out there who believe that they must essentially register their sites with Google in order to have them appear in search results at all – much less rank. This simply isn’t true. Google is sophisticated enough that it uses web crawlers to index the entire internet and there is absolutely no submission or registration required.

While link building certainly is important since it delivers more traffic to your website, there are other things that are just as important and perhaps even more important. In the past, SEO was much different. You could write nonsense, stuff in some keywords and links, and get noticed. These days, though, you should view link building as just one link in an entire chain of SEO considerations. The quality and even the frequency of the content is much more important than the number of links it includes.

#3 – Blogs Aren’t That Important Anymore

Once upon a time, a site’s blogs were the best way to climb through the search engine ranks, and without them, you may as well not even launch the site. With search engines like Google increasing the complexity of their ranking algorithms all the time, there are some folks who believe that blogs just aren’t necessary anymore. This is absolutely false. Blogs provide a dynamic source of content that helps to keep your site fresh. This will likely never change.

#4 – It Doesn’t Matter How the Site Performs

Google, Bing, and other search engines are businesses, and as businesses, their goal is to provide their customers (searchers) with the best product possible. Making sure your site loads quickly, looks nice, and is easy to use – factors involved in the overall user experience – is absolutely critical. If Google provides a list of links to slow, complicated websites, people won’t want to use Google anymore and they’ll go to a competitor. Google is aware of this, and that’s exactly why site performance and the user experience as a whole definitely matters.

#5 – Just Put the Keywords in and You’ll be Good to Go

In the early days of search engines, it was possible to type the same word over and over and over again until it filled the page, insert a keyword every few sentences, and appease the Google crawler with that. As previously mentioned in the other myths, keyword stuffing doesn’t work anymore, and it’s likely to significantly penalize your site. That’s right: if you stuff keywords in today’s day and age, Google will rank your site lower.

Search engine optimization is much better (albeit more complicated) than it once was, and that means you need to be diligent when it comes to keeping up with SEO news and changes to the major players’ indexing algorithms. Nothing ever stays the same on the internet, and this is a prime example. If any of these myths stood out to you, it’s a good idea to go back through the content on your website and optimize it the best you can.