Myth Busters
Some plugins, themes, and website builders offer “features” that no longer offer you any SEO benefit. But we don’t believe in perpetuating SEO myths. We therefore don’t offer features that we know won’t help you with your website or SEO.
Meta Keywords & Authorship
For example, using the meta keywords tag was once believed to be an effective SEO strategy. That belief was quashed more than a decade ago. And yet some plugins and website builders still offer the ability to enter that information.
Likewise, the authorship tag was once believed to be a ranking factor and that was disproven.
Cutting Edge SEO
At Good Gallery, our team is on the cutting edge of SEO. And our software is too. We not only follow industry best-practices, but we also forecast SEO changes to help you get in front of them.
Character Count Example
Google recently changed the number of characters that appear in meta descriptions. For years, they supported 150 – 160 characters. For that reason, our content tools include a character counter for that field with a recommendation to include up to 155 characters.
When Google began supporting over 300 characters in meta descriptions, we didn’t increase our recommended word count. Other systems like the Yoast plugin for WordPress quickly changed their recommendations to recognize that change.
However, we decided to keep our recommendations the same. First, we made that decision because Bing didn’t change their word count, and that search engine accounts for 20% of searches in the US market. Perhaps more importantly, we knew that Google often tests ideas and then returns to their original functionality.
Sure enough, within just a few months Google returned to their 150 – 160 average character count for meta descriptions. And then photographers using other systems had to scramble to re-adjust their overly long meta descriptions because of ill-advised recommendations from their website provider or SEO plugin.