5 SEO Myths
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The Internet has many SEO myths flying around, many of which only survive as nobody acknowledges them as being wrong, Until now. I have plucked out 5 of the Internets best SEO myths to share with you today.
If you have got this far and you have no idea what SEO is then please check out: ‘What Is SEO?‘.
Here are 5 SEO Myths of my choice:
- You have to submit your website URL to Google in order to be ranked in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). - This has not been the case for many years.
- You have to update your website regularly in order to rank well. - This may only serve to increase your crawl rate but will have no effect on how your pages rank in the SERP.
- H1 tags are mandatory to reach top spot in SERP. - This is one of the myths that I have checked out alot, and it seems if your check alot of sites that rank highly on the SERP’s they do not contain H1 tags. But I believe that you should use them anyway as they do not hurt your site.
- You need to use a Google Sitemap to rank well. - I believe that if you have built your site correctly and it can be crawled then the Google Sitemap is only of use if you wish to use the Google Webmaster Tools.
- You have to use the META Keywords in your pages content. - The META Keywords were designed to add extra keywords to your site that were not mentioned in the content. The fact is that Google ignores this attribute anyway so it makes no difference.
There you have 5 SEO Myths, feel free to introduce us to your SEO Myths below.
Mike Carr | April 11th, 2008 at 12:25 am #
Number 3 is one that I believe is a Myth and yet I still use H1 tags.
And Meta Keywords is something that I have not put as much effort into lately.
Mike
Dr Richard | April 11th, 2008 at 5:07 am #
I agree with all of these. The overall effect of optimising your pages using these techniques seems to be fairly small these days compared to other factors such as inbound links
David Shaw | April 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am #
Inbound links and title tags are in my opinion what you need to build up from.
Seología | April 17th, 2008 at 2:45 pm #
Your “myths” are not accurate. I myself have proved number 5 to be incorrect. Oh, and if I were you (since you know that much about SEO), I’d remove that nofollow from your RSS Link.
David Shaw | April 17th, 2008 at 7:18 pm #
@Seologia
Looks like we will have to disagree, if you can give me some proper proof then I will more than happily agree, but I myself and many other top website owners discredit the effect of META Keywords.
I will also be keeping the nofollow link to my rss feed. (You obviously know little about SEO if you dont nofollow to your rss)
wrs website optimalisatie | June 15th, 2008 at 10:36 am #
1. You dont have to submit your site over and over to google, in so far correct but if a site is totally fresh and has no incoming links it cant hurt to submit it once.
2. Google like to show the MOST RELAVANT pages first in the ranks for a specific query but what if you have to pages which are same old and relevant, yep it will show the one who is last updated because it assumes that this information is more accurate. Just try to update a page, and not realy saving it again, but updating (changing)it and you will see something does change if your not on no.1 to see the difference.
3. H1 ones are NOT a mandatory, correct, still i use them.
4. Correct, i rank good without a sitemap from google but it helps to get fresh content listed and updated faster.
5. People always say google ignores keywords, might be true but i still use them because other SE do read them.
There is a little voice in my head that says that google will not give you a plus value by it but it might give you a lesser rank if you use keywords not listed in your body text and your actually abusing your keyword tag.
Marion Nesmith | June 27th, 2008 at 3:46 pm #
I’m really shocked about this article. Let’s just take “keywords”. You have fallen into the GOOGLE, GOOGLE, GOOGLE mindset. There are so many more search engines that “DO” still use keywords. The combine’s total traffic of the other search engines is greater than google. Ignore any of these and you are not going to realize the sites potential query space.
Also …crawl rate… can you please tell me when a site is going to be crawled???? If you can determine this great, let me know, I’ll certainly use this little piece of insider information.
Steve | July 29th, 2008 at 11:52 pm #
#1 - You are right that you don’t need to submit your site to Google, in fact if you do, it will take 2-3 months for it to show up. But if your site is not referenced anywhere, you do need to consider this. Better yet, submit your site to DIGG, Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, Propeller, ODP, and Technorati. This will get you indexed in Google within 1 week.
#2 - True, you don’t need to update your website regularly, but if all else is consistent between your site and your competitors, who do you think will have the better SERP?
#3 - As far as heading tags are concerned, this is the 3rd most valuable SEO item to use. I can give references if you want, but you can find out for yourself if you know how to use a search engine. However, if you do use the tag, be aware that this tag can be used only once per page.
#4 - Are you talking about an XML sitemap here? Let’s assume you use flash or javascript for your navigation. You tell me how a search spider is gonna find all of your web pages - please!!
#5 - You are correct that meta keywords have no effect - unless you are optimizing for Yahoo. Yahoo still uses meta keywords; see here: http://www.seobook.com/why-seos-should-use-meta-keywords-tag-their-homepage.
In retrospect, if you want to get serious about SEO, there are several sites that offer free advice, tools, and tutorials. 3 of my favorites are http://webceo.com/, http://www.seobook.com/, and http://searchengineland.com/
Amateur Protagonist SEO | November 4th, 2008 at 9:41 pm #
I believe using as many different SEO methods as you can will pay off. If it does not work on google it may work on another search engine.