10 SEO Myths Dispelled By Stephen Logan At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

SEO is an industry awash with mistruths, misunderstanding and misconceptions. This article looks at 10 of the most common SEO myths and why it is so important not to be lured in by them.

1. You Need to Keep Submitting your Site to Search Engines to Improve Rank

You only need to submit your website to the search engines ONCE! Repeatedly submitting your site will not mean that the search engines will find it any quicker. Re-submitting your site after little change made will not help increase your search engine position and will more than likely only annoy the search engines.

2. Overloading META with Keywords will get you to the top of Google

Keywords play a major role in search engine optimisation and they must be researched and implemented correctly to achieve the desired results. However, this does not mean that the META of every page should be stuffed with keywords. You need to make sure the keywords you have are relevant and page specific. Don’t just put every single keyword you can think of into the top level META.

3. Doorway and Gateway Pages Help Earn Extra Visitors

A gateway page is exactly as it sounds, a page that is created with the sole purpose of directing traffic to a secondary website. Not only is this a waste of your resources, but the search engines don’t look too kindly on it. In fact if Google find out that you own both sites or even suspect it, they can lower your ranking or throw you out of their listings entirely. Good in theory, hopeless in real life – avoid at all costs.

4. Cloaking is a Good way to Boost your Ranking

Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you could build a site that was perfectly optimised from a search engine’s perspective, but looked completely different to users – NO! This is a well known ruse called cloaking, one of the most underhanded black hat techniques – one that the search engines have long since cottoned on to. Often this is only used to cloak illicit material and present it as something entirely different; however, the underlying practice is widely frowned upon, so don’t fall foul of this one.

5. Duplicating Content does no Harm

If your website contains content that has been directly copied from another site you will be penalised! You need to ensure the content displayed on your site is original and unique otherwise Google may restrict your ranking placement.

6. Money is Power

Google ranks websites according to relevance and no matter how much money is spent on sponsored listings, if your site isn’t relevant for the specific search phrase, you will not appear highly in the natural listings.

7. All links will Increase Relevance

It is a common misconception that the more links you have the better. Google will apply more weight to quality and relevant links than they will to the quantity of links.

8. Web Designers and IT Technicians Qualify as SEO Experts

Although web designers and IT technicians are extremely talented in their specific area of expertise it doesn’t mean that they automatically qualify as SEO experts. SEO is a profession in itself and many SEO experts spend years developing and increasing their knowledge on the industry.

9. ‘We Guarantee Your Site Will Be Top of Google within a Year’

Only an SEO snake oil salesman would make this claim. Nobody, possibly with the exception of Google’s top bosses – i.e. those who have an intimate understanding of their algorithms – can truly say this statement and mean it. SEO as a practice is borne out of patience and constant testing; you simply can’t guarantee a first place on any search engine, even if that is the ultimate aim.

10. A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

Not on Google it doesn’t. All your pictures should have Alt tags attached; these should be short descriptive names that all the images to be scanned by search engine crawlers. But images can’t simply replace body copy and HTML. These are the core elements of website optimisation and are needed on every page right throughout, including your navigation buttons, to ensure easy movement for the ‘spiders’ throughout the site and a decent authority ranking when it is indexed.

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