Debunking Myths about SEO
There may be more myths about SEO than there are cold hard facts.
The reason is because search engine optimization is a guessing game. Not only that, it’s always changing, so yesterday’s myths may be tomorrow’s fact. People are always trying to stay one step ahead of the system. Google never makes it known exactly what is the best formula for SEO success, so site owners are left to trial and error and seeing what has worked for other people. In the world of the web, there’s lot of misinformation floating about. So what are some of the most common myths about SEO that you should avoid?
Myth #1:
The URL is the most important tag you can have.
Granted, a strong URL is great. If you have the URL makemoney.com, you’re gold. What people do is overload URL’s with every keyword imaginable: such as make-money-get-rich-quick-online.com. That doesn’t raise your chances significantly that you’re going to get thousands of “get rich quick” queries. Additionally, it’s just a poorly-formed URL. Branding should matter just as much as SEO and surfers just aren’t going to trust a site with that type of URL. Finally, look at sites like Digg or Mixx or even Google. They’re brands that aren’t keyword based, so don’t be overly concerned if all the good niche URL’s are already taken.
Myth #2:
Metatags are still what they used to be.
The most important tag for a page is not a series of keyword tags associated with a post that will likely be ignored by search engines, but in how the page appears in Google. If you use metatags effectively, a page will have a clean title, such as Page Title: Website Name, as well as a nice brief discussion about what’s in the post. However, that won’t necessarily make the page rank higher in Google, it will just let surfers know what they can find when clicking the link. It’s more surfer optimization than search engine optimization.
Myth #3:
Content needs to be a minimum length.
There’s a rumor that content needs to be 400 words to be indexed by Google. This is how these myths start. On the one hand, it’s recommended that you keep keyword density to 3% of overall content. So the more you write, the lower that density is going to be, so you won’t run the risk of being red-flagged. However, that doesn’t mean that having a longer page automatically makes the page rank higher. That said, longer content doesn’t convey more authority and it has greater potential to be keyword-rich, so it’s recommended – but counting words for the sake of it doesn’t make sense.
Myth #4:
Flash is bad.
Flash can be entirely effective, when used sparingly. If your entire site is a flash vacuum that cannot be indexed for content, then yes: don’t do this. But to spruce up your site and add some professionalism, putting some flash elements into your site isn’t necessarily going to hurt your optimization efforts.
Myth #5:
Linking out to a bad neighborhood can make your site look like a terrible link farm that will lead to a banning.
Yes, this has been known to happen, but it’s not an overwhelming problem. Think of outbound links like you’d think of keyword density. If you have 100 outbound links and 5 of them go to subpar sites, those sites aren’t going to overwhelm the other 95. Proportionally, you’ve linked to more high-quality sites. So even though you want to avoid doing this, you’re still likely going to retain your rank if one gets through the goalie.
That should help you get started…to not worry so much. Just know that in SEO, slow and steady wins the race. There are no “get rank quick” schemes that fall under white hat (and aren’t SEM) so you have to be patient before your search engine rank improves..
Author: Neostead | Content Protected By Copyscape