SEO is about the overall experience for a searcher, and that experience starts the moment they enter a search query. The better their experience with you – from your SERP listing to the quality and relevancy of the content on your site, to the ease with which they can move through your site – the better your SEO will be, too.

This guide is going to point out all of the most common myths & assumptions regarding how SEO works and debunk them for you, so you’re not wasting a single moment on things that simply don’t matter for SEO in 2017. Let’s get started:

1. I must submit my site to Google.
2. More links are better than more content.
3. Having a secure (HTTPS encrypted) site isn’t important for SEO.
4. SEO is all about ranking.
5. Meta descriptions have a huge impact on search rankings.
6. Pop-ups will always hurt my ranking in search.
7. Keyword optimization is THE key to SEO.
8. Keywords need to be an exact match.
9. The H1 is the most important on-page element.
10. My homepage needs a lot of content.
11. The more pages I have, the better.
12. Good user experience is an added bonus, not a requirement.
13. Local SEO doesn’t matter anymore.
14. Google will never know if I have bad sites linking to me.
15. Images don’t require any optimization.
16. Answer boxes only matter if you’re Wikipedia.
17. I don’t need a mobile optimization strategy.
18. SEO is something I can hand off to IT.

Now you know what are the common SEO myths, Understanding these SEO truths will make you both more effective and more efficient with your organic search strategy.

18 SEO Myths in 2017 Based on HubSpot