By definition, a cliché is an unoriginal or overused phrase. It can be a huge turn-off for those who come to you for expert industry advice and make you come across very disingenuous. The business world is littered with clichés, whether it be arguments, processes or simply words and phrases, and the SEO industry is no different. So when discussing SEO and optimization strategies with your clients, coworkers, bosses, or anyone else, avoid saying any of these:
“Link Juice”
This term in the SEO world refers to the power passed to your website via links from external or internal sources. People use it to mean it is an important factors in determining your site's search ranking, but it’s far too vague to really mean anything to people who aren’t especially privy SEO-related knowledge. And people who already do know a lot about SEO will instantly think your strategy is full of jargon and no specifics.
Google recently announced that mobile devices were the main source of its search traffic, an announcement that came much more quickly than anyone ever predicted. Preparing your website to be ideally seen on mobile devices is a fantastic direction to take, but the term itself has come to mean too much and also nothing at all. Preparing for mobile means more than just “readable on an iPhone.” It means making sure your viewers can do everything on a phone or tablet that they can do on the desktop.
“Optimal Keyword Density”
Exactly how many keywords should you be using for each piece of content? There really is no correct answer to that, because the question itself it flawed. You shouldn't’ be creating content to force in keywords; you should be creating pieces that your readers will enjoy. Write natural page copy which is always focused on the key phrases and related key phrases. Never calculate density in order to identify the best percentage; there are way too many other things to work on.
Google announces new algorithms but never exactly how they calculate page rankings, so you can't guarantee that someone won't be penalized by something. There are loads of examples of unfair penalties and a lot of them are on sites that thought they were doing White hat practices, so thinking you can 100% prevent something bad from happening is crazy.
“Matt Cutts Once Said…”
This one is a personal favorite. As he is the head of the webspam team at Google, King of SEO and all around smart guy, Matt Cutts has become a pretty popular guy to quote. More often than not, he is widely misquoted. And because of the constant changes in SEO, even a correct quote from 2009 could easily no longer apply in 2015 and beyond.
Are there any other SEO or inbound marketing clichés in general that I didn’t mention here? Leave me a note in the comments or tweet me your favorite (or least favorite)!
Happy Cliché Day, everyone! We’ll try our best to celebrate it today and leave these unpardonable sins out of our content and conversations for the rest of the year. If you need some helping staying up-to-date with better SEO terminology to use, download our free eBook Modern SEO today.