15 Common SEO Myths

There are a lot of myths about SEO out there. It seems every day a new one is born while old ones get passed around as fact by people who don’t know better. Then there are the scammers who use miss-information and people’s lack of understanding to part them with their cash or manipulate their own sites rankings. Picking out the good information from the bad can be a tricky minefield at best.

So to help squash some of these common myths about SEO I put together a list of 15 ones that I’ve come across.

1. Using a service that registers your site to thousands of search engines is a great way to boost your search rankings.

If you believe this one then you should send money to that banker from Africa who wants to send you millions of dollars for a small fee to release the funds. Sure there are thousands of search engines out there, but who really uses them there all but useless. The only ones you need to worry about are the big ones such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. All those other no name search engines you’ve never heard of before get their results from Google anyway.

2. Don’t use Google Analytics, they will take your information, spy on you and use it against you.

We all know that Google is in it for world domination and have thousands of computers monitoring your every move. Oh and YouTube is streaming subliminal messages into your brain when you watch videos. If there was ever bad seo advice to be given it’s this one.

Analytics is simply a tracking tool used to gauge your websites performance, not to spy on you.

3. Meta tags boost your ranking

Talking about bad seo advice, optimizing Meta tags is a complete waste of time. Once upon a time probably back in the 90`s they actually did something, today though there useless because they’ve been over abused by spammers to death.

4. Googlebot doesn’t read CSS

If anybody told you this one tell them to give their head a shake. Googlebot has no problems reading CSS and scans it all the time to weed out spam tactics.

5. You have to update your homepage all the time if you want it to rank well

Yes you should add new content on a regular schedule, and it’s a good idea to update and make changes to your site to fix problems and to make your site run better. But it’s a myth that you need to constantly change your homepage. Plenty of websites with homepages that don’t update have no problems ranking well on Google. However this is an SEO myth that won’t hurt your site.

6. Trading links helps boost your page rank and search engine ranking

Trading links also known as reciprocal links hold next to no value. When you have two sites that have a link on each others homepages, those links cancel each other out. It looks even worse when it’s done on a large scale and to sites that are irrelevant. Think about it you visit a website that deals with car accessories or making money online and you see a link to Joe Bloggins Star Trek website about how he rants about who he thinks is cooler Captain Kirk or Captain Picard. Would you visit that site? Probably not.

7. SEO is a black art

Since when did trying to optimize a website involve dark rituals and human sacrifice?

8. SEO is a one time thing you only need to do when you first launch your website

Two things are never finished when dealing with your website. The first is the actual site itself, if your new to websites you’ll learn quickly that your website is never truly finished. There will always be something that needs to be done such as adding content, to fixing problems, to updating the layout. The second is SEO, Anyone who tells you that you only need to focus on it once and then leave it is giving you bad SEO advice, if you want to rank well you need to constantly build work on building up your ranking. Otherwise any sites competing against you is going to bury yours.

9. Placing links in tiny sized fonts at the bottom of your homepage is an effective way to boost the rankings of pages in your site.

Obviously for site navigation you need to have some form of menu bar that’s easy to see for visitors to get from one page to another. But placing tiny links at the bottom of your homepage won’t do anything to help. In fact if their hard to see, chances are good they won’t even use them.

10. Site maps aren’t for people

Another common SEO myth is that a site map is only intended for bots to crawl your site and index your pages, but this is only half true. Every site should have a site map that caters to both human and bot visitors. The fact is many visitors usually go to the site map first to look for a specific page.

11. You should stuff the background of your pages with invisible text

If anybody tells you it’s a good idea to use invisible text to stuff your pages with keywords should be bitch slapped. This is really bad SEO advice; in fact it’s considered an old black hat trick to try to fool the bots to rank a site better. Do not do this if you actually want your site to rank well.

12. Your homepage should be the focus of all your search engine efforts

This is true if your website is only one page. The reality is you should try to optimize every page of your site. Use long tail keywords (keyword phrases that are more then two words usually 4 or 5) submit your pages to social sites like Digg and Stumbleupon, and tweet them. And because every page you create has a chance to do well in the search engines, you should also include a call to arms like subscribing to a newsletter or feed to attract repeat visitors.

13. Flash websites and SEO don’t mix

This used to be the case, but like many SEO myths on this list that isn’t true anymore. Flash can be indexed and crawled by Google. Look at it this way if using flash kills your SEO then why is it offered so much on website builders or on sites like Wix where you can create an entire website based on flash?

14. Google endorses me

If you get an email from a so called expert claiming that Google either endorses or collaborates with them, do yourself a favour and delete the message because they are full of crap. And treat any website that claims to be like it has a case of raging herpes. Google doesn’t endorse anyone but Google, they don’t endorse SEO experts and there isn’t any priority submission to Google or anything related to that.

15. Links from social don’t affect your websites search engine rankings

Again this used to be the case, today however a lot of weight is placed on links from social networking sites. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are major players when it comes to online traffic and because of it not only can it bring your site a tonne of traffic but high quality inbound links as well that will help you get indexed faster.

Again if any so called expert tells you otherwise please feel free to slap them.

There you have it 15 common SEO myths busted. This is by no means all of them, and new ones are popping up all the time as things change online. To see more seo myths check out the following links. If you like this post please stumble and digg it.

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