Some SEO advice has been wrong for over a decade and is still being sold as gospel. It shows up in cold emails promising to place your website on page one in thirty days, in a confident tip about repeating your keyword, and in the SEO plugin fields most owners scroll past.
Most SEO myths are shortcuts. Each one promises a lever you can pull to skip the line, and each one either does nothing or works against you. Google has spent years getting better at spotting them, so the business following old advice often ends up behind the one that never heard it.
Our small business SEO checklist covered what to do to grow your site’s presence over time. This post covers what to stop doing. Three myths come up more than any others: that repeating your keyword helps you rank, that you have to buy links to compete, and that the title and description on each page are only there for Google. We’ll address each of these myths and offer a better habit to replace it.
Stop Repeating Your Keyword
Saying your keyword more often doesn’t help you rank. The idea dates back to early search engines, when repeating a phrase was enough to signal what a page was about. Doing it today is called keyword stuffing, repeating a word or phrase so often that the copy stops sounding like something a person would write.
Here’s what it looks like for a plumber. “Looking for a plumber in Pasadena? Our Pasadena plumber team is the best Pasadena plumber for any Pasadena plumbing job.” Nobody talks that way, and it’s the kind of repetition Google’s spam policy describes.
Google lists keyword stuffing among its spam policies, and pages that break them may rank lower or not appear in results at all. More often the result is a slow slide in visibility, with no notice and no explanation, so you can lose ground without knowing why.
There’s no safe number to aim for, either. You may have heard a rule like “once every 200 words,” or a target percentage. Google’s John Mueller has said keyword density isn’t a ranking factor, so counting mentions measures for something Google doesn’t use.
Stuffing isn’t always a paragraph that sounds like a robot wrote it. Check these places on your own site.
- Service area pages. A separate page for every nearby city that repeats the city and the service in every sentence, with nothing else to say about the area.
- Footers. Long lists of towns or services stacked at the bottom of every page with no context around them.
- Titles and descriptions. The same phrase repeated several times in the text people see in search results.
- Alt text. Image descriptions, the short text that tells screen readers and search engines what a picture shows, loaded with keywords instead of describing the picture.
- Hidden text. White text on a white background, or keywords tucked into the code. Visitors never see it, but Google treats it as deliberate spam.
Write for the question your customer asked. Cover the topic the way you’d explain it in casual conversation: the problem, the options, what it costs, and what to expect. The words customers use come up on their own, and so do related ones. The first part of our checklist covers how to find the exact phrases people search with.
Then read the page out loud. A sentence that sounds strange to your ear will sound strange to a customer.
Skip the Link Shopping
You don’t need to buy links to compete. A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and search engines treat each one as a vote of confidence in your business. That’s why a whole industry sells them, usually in packages like “50 links a month.”
The trouble is that Google counts buying links to influence rankings as spam. Its policies also name excessive link swaps (“link to me and I’ll link to you”) and automated link building, and its systems are built to spot and discount links like these. Best case, you paid for votes that don’t count. Worst case, your site slips in the results.
Ads and sponsorships are a separate matter. Those links are fine when they carry a small label in the code, rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", that tells Google not to count them as a vote.
Here are a few signs a link offer is one to avoid.
- A promise of “X links per month.” No one controls how many sites choose to link to you, so a guaranteed count usually means the links are manufactured.
- Sites with nothing to do with your business. A roofer linked from a cryptocurrency blog looks like exactly what it is.
- Link swaps and “partner” pages. Pages built only to link to each other are on Google’s list of spam examples.
- No list of sites up front. If a seller won’t say where the links will appear before you pay, you can’t judge what you’re buying.
Social media links help people find you, not rank you. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky are worth keeping up, but most links posted on them are marked so that search engines don’t count them as votes, and Google has said likes and shares aren’t a ranking factor. What a post can do is send visitors to your site and put your work in front of people who may link to it later.
A few links from people who know you carry more weight than a long list from sites nobody visits. Think of the chamber of commerce, a supplier that lists its customers, a local paper that quoted you, or a nonprofit you sponsor. Those links build slowly, which is also why they’re hard to fake. Part 3 of our SEO checklist covers how to earn them.
Before you pay anyone for links, ask which sites they’ll come from and ask to see the list first. If they can’t name the sites, walk away.
Use the Links You Already Control
The links on your own site are the part of linking you can improve today. An internal link is a link from one page of your site to another, and unlike a backlink, no one else has to agree to it. Internal links help Google find your pages and understand how they relate, and they give visitors an easy next step.
The clearest case is the orphaned page, one that no other page on your site links to. Google finds pages by following links, so a page with nothing pointing at it can go unnoticed, and so can your visitors. Fortunately, fixing that takes a few minutes per page.
A few habits make internal linking pay off.
- Link as you publish. When you add a new page or post, link to it from related pages and older posts already on your site, and link out from the new one to related content. Two or three links each way is plenty. Going back to update an older post with a link to something newer is fine, and it’s how new content gets found.
- Describe where the link goes. The clickable words of a link are called anchor text, and “our carpet cleaning services” tells visitors and Google what’s on the other side. “Click here” tells neither.
- Leave the keyword out of most links. Google’s own guidance says anchor text should be descriptive and concise, and that if you’re forcing keywords into it, it’s probably too much. That’s the same repetition problem as stuffing, just inside your links.
- Check for orphans. Go through your pages and make sure each one is linked from at least one other page. SEO plugins and site audits can list the ones that aren’t.
A good internal link is a recommendation to your own visitor. If you’d send a customer to that page in conversation, link to it. Part 2 of our SEO checklist covers where internal links fit among the other on-page basics.
Write Titles for People, Not Just Google
The title and description of each page are your listing in the search results. The meta title is the clickable headline, and the meta description is the short summary underneath it. Neither appears on your site itself, but a customer comparing ten results reads them before deciding who to click.
Many owners treat these as hidden fields for keywords, or skip them altogether. A title packed with repeated phrases is the worst version, because it gives a customer no reason to click, and Google’s guidance lists keyword stuffing in titles as something to avoid. Google has also said meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor. Their job is to get the click, and a well-written one can bring more visitors from the ranking you already have.
Here’s the difference for a heating company. A weak title is “Smith HVAC,” and a stronger one is “Furnace Repair in Pasadena | Smith HVAC.” A weak description is “We offer HVAC services and have been in business for many years. Contact us today.” A stronger one is “Furnace not heating? Smith HVAC repairs gas and electric furnaces across Pasadena. See pricing and book a visit.”
A few habits make these work.
- Give every page its own title. The same title on every page, or a vague one like “Home,” tells neither Google nor a customer what’s on that page. Google’s guidance asks for a unique, descriptive title on each page.
- Lead with what the page is about. Put the topic first and your business name after it, so the part that matters is the part that survives if the title gets cut off.
- Describe what the page delivers. If the description promises something the page doesn’t have, visitors leave quickly and Google is more likely to replace your wording with its own.
- Treat character counts as a guide. Around 60 characters for titles and 160 for descriptions is a common target, but Google sets no fixed limit and cuts text to fit the screen width.
- Start with your most important pages. Your home page, your service pages, and any posts already bringing in visitors come first. The rest can follow over time.
Google may also show something other than what you wrote. One large study found that it replaced about six in ten meta descriptions, usually with text pulled from the page itself. Writing yours accurately, and making sure the page answers the question, gives you the best chance that what shows up is something you’d have chosen.
Every search result is a first impression. The customer reading it hasn’t seen your site yet, so those two lines are the whole pitch.
Steady Work Beats Shortcuts
Every myth in this post promises a lever. Repeat the keyword more, buy more links, tuck more phrases into the hidden fields. What actually holds up is slower and less exciting: pages that answer what customers ask, links from people who know you, and titles written for the person reading them.
The next time an SEO pitch lands in your inbox, try one test. Ask what it changes on your site, or in your business, that a customer would notice. A promise of page one in thirty days has no answer to that, and neither does a package of links from sites you’ve never heard of.
If the pitch comes from a company you’re thinking of hiring, our guide to choosing a web design agency you can trust covers the checks to make before you pay a deposit.
A site people find useful is the one search engines keep sending customers to.