Top 5 Things NOT to Worry About in SEO

While there are many factors you should be concerned with when conducting SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work, there are also some things you shouldn’t worry about. Here are the top five things not to worry about with regard to SEO.

1.) Don’t worry about the “Keywords” META tag; it isn’t nearly as important to search engines as it once was, and it is quite possible to be successful in SEO efforts without using this tag at all. It can actually be detrimental to use the “Keywords” META tag excessively; pages with large numbers of keywords consume more bandwidth and load less quickly, without providing any benefit to the website’s visitors. If there is limited time, it is better to just leave this tag out than worry about whether or not you have properly implemented it.

2.) It often isn’t necessary to worry about doing better at SEO than your competitors. Don’t spend all of your time trying to get better major keyword search rankings than competing websites; you may be overlooking popular keywords or phrases competitors aren’t even using, which pages of your site could more easily be optimized for.

3.) Try not to worry about how soon your website’s new SEO oriented pages will appear in search results. It can sometimes take weeks for new pages to become listed on search engines; it isn’t worth spending a lot of time checking if they have appeared yet. Just review the website’s traffic statistics every day or two, when you start to see hits to the new pages you’ll know that they have been listed, and you can check to see how they rank for different keywords if you are interested in this.

4.) If you have a large SEO project to finish on your own website or a client’s site, try not to worry about how much work it will be overall. Determine how much work you need to do each day and complete it steadily, finishing one step at a time. Trying to get it all done in the shortest time possible is more stressful and overwhelming.

5.) Don’t worry excessively about your website’s PageRank (PR) on Google or the PR of its individual pages. Unless you are selling advertising based upon your PR, your goal in SEO is to receive more hits from search engine users, not to have a higher PageRank. It’s better to spend time on determining how much traffic individual webpages are receiving, and where it is coming from, than checking their PR levels.