SEO Myths & Legends Article: The first myth I would like to debunk is what we talked about in "SEO Keyword Research".
I cannot stress this enough. First to avoid confusion, I define "industry leader" as a broad term leader like "cars.com" for "cars", or "Dell.com" for "computers". Not the top ranking site for multi-word keywords. How these websites became an industry leader is a very different portion of SEO then what they are now. The number one factor in SEO ranking is traffic. Search engines rely on users as the final judge of both the search engines translation of your site and your SEO efforts. So industry leaders are not as concerned with SEO as you are. In life, I believe you should shoot for the stars. In SEO however, your goals should be small steps towards the stars. Grow with each step so your website becomes powerful enough to reach the stars and more importantly, stay there.
This next myth was slightly highlighted in the above paragraph. Your URL is not the most important thing. In the above paragraph I used cars.com and Dell as examples. Both market leaders, but only one has the keyword in their URL. It is not as important as people think, but more importantly, it leads to people launching multiple websites just to have multiple keywords in their URLs. I even see this advised from so called "professionals" and SEO advisers. This is horribly wrong and floods the internet with more websites making more wore work for search engines. In essence, you are competing with yourself.
Build your site more like a grocery store. You are about "groceries", but each aisle (representing a page or topic) has a defined and generally related list of products offered in it. You define these "aisles" by making sure the content on the page(s) reflects the products in the aisles. You never walked into a grocery store and asked where the groceries are did you? But we have all asked where a specific product is. Would you shop at a grocery store that had dry foods in one store, dairy down the block, pet products around the corner, etc.? Then why do it on your website(s)?
Again, to avoid confusion in that last paragraph, we will reference our market leader cars.com. This site has dozens, maybe even 100's of topics on it. From reviews, loans, stories, marketplaces etc., all under one URL. It did not branch its finance and car loan section into another URL like "carfinacing.com" for example. However, the site is well designed to support all these topics and connects them in a relative and smart way, so both the user and the search engine understand this is a relative, albeit minor topic of the site. And guess what, at the time of writing this, cars.com comes up number eight in Google for the term "car financing".
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