SEO was really my gateway into digital marketing. Learning SEO in the early days of my career years ago served as my introduction to marketing on the Web. It’s what opened me up to a new world that included analytics, HTML, user experience, and so much more.

It’s an incredible feeling to build a fantastic website, create great content, to see people find it, and ultimately have those visitors convert. In a nutshell, that’s what made me fall in love with digital marketing in the first place. The outcomes, feedback, learning, and constant refinement is addicting.

Today, this practice blends art and science, and being successful is more about the quality of content and UX than anything else. Unfortunately, SEO has gotten a bad wrap and myths continue to be perpetuated.

Here are just a handful of my favorite myths, in no particular order:

1. SEO Myth: Google Only Ranks ‘Fresh’ Content

Google wants to provide users with the most relevant content for any search query. That’s often been interpreted to mean that to have content rank it must be fresh, new and timely. In other words, the most recently published content has the best chance of near-term success, while older content is bound to decline in organic traffic.

‘Freshness’ is indeed an important signal, but it’s also query-dependent. That means that how fresh a piece of content is likely depends on the query. For sites operating in fast-paced news, fresh content may be key. But for the majority of websites, freshness is less of a factor. Consider the topic that you’re targeting. If it’s one that’s constantly evolving, then it could be important to refresh and/or republish that content regularly to ensure Google doesn't consider it stale.

2. SEO Myth: You Don’t Need Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the snippets of content that can be found under a website’s title tag in the search engine results page. They are basically a short summary of the web page that gives users an idea of what they are potentially clicking into. In many cases, Google will develop one automatically based on the page content.

It’s true that meta descriptions by themselves are no longer directly influencing rankings. However, they play a huge role in the searcher’s behavior and in driving engagement with your page’s SERP listing, click-through, and on-site conversion. If users don’t find what they’re looking for in the meta description, or it doesn’t accurately describe the page, they’ll probably move on to a competitor’s listing.

3. SEO Myth: Google Will Penalize a Website for Duplicate Content

It’s widely believed that duplicate content is a website’s kryptonite, paralyzing it from visibility in search engine results. While it can influence what organic results Google shows, duplicate content doesn't necessarily bring ranking doom.

Instead, Google will just ignore the duplicate content altogether. Keep in mind: if you have instances of duplicate content on your website, those pages may be ignored by search engines, which won’t help or hurt your organic rankings. Luckily, there are some tools out there that can help identify duplicate content on a website, such as Copyscape, but know that some duplicate is not completely unusual.

4. SEO Myth: An SEO Agency is the Best Way to Get Fast Rankings

Always be weary of any promise from agencies of rankings or fast results. If you have the budget, there can certainly be good reasons to hire an SEO agency to help with a host of activities, particularly if you’re short on internal resources or want a fresh perspective on how to improve your search traffic. However, SEO needs to be considered an ongoing effort, not a one-time project or something to get a quick win. It’s driven by data and planned, periodic spurts of increased activity scheduled ahead of time.

Google handles over 100 billion searches per month, so no SEO can predict how or what people are going to search tomorrow, or be able to make any guarantee of fast search rankings. SEO is a long-term practice that’s impacted by the age and history of domain names, authority links, and in-depth, high-quality content, among many other factors. There are many websites out there that check these boxes, but still struggle to rank well. Know that playing the long game is what it takes to not only get to the top of results, but to stay there.

5. SEO Myth: SEO is Dead

Last but not least. Google is more sophisticated than ever and makes it more challenging for SEOs to crack the formula to higher rankings. Moreover, search engine results pages look much different now than they did a decade or more ago. Increasingly, Google is serving up its own answers to searchers’ queries, before they reach traditional website listings. Even voice searches are becoming the norm in our smart homes.

However, the truth is that as long as search engines still exist and show organic results for users hungry for answers—answers that can be influenced in some fashion—SEO isn’t dead. At its core, SEO is about finding ways to satisfy user needs, answer their questions, and it’s about tailoring a website’s architecture or content to meet a searcher’s expectations. That’s something that will continue to be an essential practice.