7 SEO Myths… Busted!
Posted on 25. Oct, 2009 by Lyz in blog, seo
Search Engine Results Page (SERPS)
A lot of people I meet are confused by search engine optimisation – they say it’s because there’s a lot of conflicting advice about what they should be doing on their websites.
This is true to some extent but if you listen to search optimisation professionals they do, for the most part, agree on the most important aspects of seo that affect rankings – the trick I guess is working out who the experts are!
Myth 1. Search Engines change all the time – I’ll never keep up
It’s true that search engines do change the way they index and categorise web site pages but these changes don’t happen all that often and when they do, they’re just trying to provide the searcher with the most relevant, most up to date content related to their search query. So providing you observe best practice search engine optimisation techniques you’ll be fine. You may even benefit from the changes!
Myth 2. It’s too difficult, I haven’t got the right skills
Search engine optimisation per se isn’t that hard you just need to follow the basic rules. What it does take is time, patience and dedication. SEO is not a quick fix solution, to get a high website ranking you need to persevere and allocate time and energy to achieving it but the rewards can be huge and the return on investment well worth it.
Myth 3. I’ll pay someone to do a quick SEO job on my site
Paying someone else to do your SEO is one way to do it. But beware, improving your search engine rankings takes continual work – there’s no such thing as a ‘quick seo job’. Paying a web professional a one-off fee to overhaul your site may give you some quick wins, depending on how lacking your site is, but the only way to achieve good rankings in the long-term is to have an ongoing strategy of adding fresh and unique content. So be prepared to pay a monthly retainer if you don’t want to do it yourself!
Myth 4. My SEO company guarantees a number one ranking on Google
There’s no such thing as guarantees where SEO and search engines are concerned and you should be very wary of anyone who promises such a thing. In fact, delete their emails and don’t answer the phone!
Myth 5. The keyword and description meta tags are the most important part of my seo activity
Years ago this was true but due to spammers misusing these tags they no longer hold the importance they once did. That’s not to say you shouldn’t include that information in your pages, you should, but it’s nowhere near as important as say using the <h1> title tag on your pages and making sure your main keywords are included in it.
Myth 6. I can just put a whole list of keywords at the bottom of my page in white text and no-one will know
Wrong! Very wrong. Google will know – it doesn’t look at the design of your site it just reads the words so it doesn’t matter what colour your text is, the search engines will find it. The very real danger is that they will likely consider this as spamming and may drop your website from their index completely. If you’re unlucky this may be permanent so my advice is don’t test it.
Myth 7. Putting my website on several domains will give me a better chance of ranking well
No, no and no. This will really harm your search optimisation efforts. If Google finds the same or very similar content in more than one place it gets confused, it doesn’t know which is the authority and so doesn’t know which one to give the higher ranking to. But more seriously duplicate content is widely used in Black Hat SEO to cheat search engines into giving them more exposure in the search engine results pages (SERPS) – the search engines may blacklist your site even if you’re not intentionally trying to cheat. Ignorance is no defence!
The answer
If you’re interested in optimising your site to get improved positions in the SERPs then the best thing to do is pay a search consultant/agency to perform a review of your site and provide you with a blueprint or road-map on how to improve your site both now and ongoing. That way, you’ll get the best advice but you’ll save money by doing the work yourself – and you’ll learn loads along the way!
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