Search Engine Optimisation Myths - Top Five Dirty Lies

Search Engine Optimisation Myths - Top Five Dirty Lies

Author: Joanne May

If you´re new to the SEO game you´ll find that there´s a whole lot of information that you need to know. More importantly you´ll find there´s a lot of misinformation going around and it´s easy to fall for the lies. So how do you sort the good tips from bad?

It can be a minefield, but just to get you started I´ve listed my top five search engine optimization myths:

Meta Tags are the key to successful SEO

Let me tell you a secret: search engine crawlers ignore the keyword and description meta tags. Seriously. They know you can cram in as many keywords as you want because your human visitors won´t see them. It´s a safe bet that meta tags have little or no influence over your ranking - and specialists have known this secret for years.

The description meta tags are significant because they can control what displays in the Google results page. Another significant meta tag is robots.txt as it can be used primarily to keep search engines spiders out of your website. And remember: the Title Tag is not a meta tag! Great Title Tags are crucial to success.

Make sure you resubmit to the search engines regularly

It´s amazing how many times you will be offered an SEO package that includes a monthly resubmit to the search engines.

Only do this if you want to throw your money down the drain. Search engines prefer to find your new content by their own regular crawling of your site. They also prefer to discover your site via quality inbound links, so shouting about your site to them won´t help.

3. Hide text on your pages by putting white text on a white background

This is a trick that worked last century, but today you´d be stupid to stuff invisible keywords into your websites. The idea is to increase the density of your keyword phrase without human visitors seeing it. Please don´t do it.

Google explicitly advises against hidden text in its Webmaster Quality Guidelines and in 2005 Google´s Jagger update slammed websites using invisible text.

Some Black Hat will give your rankings the boost they need

Run for the hills.

Black hat search engine optimization is simply cheating. Google has a long memory; that means if you do a bit of black hat now and then stop, Google will still remember your bad behavior. And track you down.

Google is quite straight forward in terms of what it considers to be good and bad practice. And it doesn´t take a genius to understand the basics of black hat SEO. Spamming on blogs. Link farms. Doorway pages. Keyword stuffing.

Guaranteed Number One Ranking

Any search engine optimization company that promises to make you number one is either being economical with the truth or is trying to con you. Internet Marketing companies don´t control the search engines. And they can´t predict the changes that are happening on a regular basis.

What they may do is make you number one for an obscure phrase like "20-something Internet Marketing advisor Nottingham." Phrases that will do nothing to help your business. If you hear promises like that, just say "thanks, but no thanks" and walk away.

So there are just some of the lies circulating about successful SEO. If a company tries to sell you their services by talking about any of these techniques, run a mile!