Search Engine Optimization

SEO: Separating Fact from Fiction

Search Engine Optimization, also know as SEO, ensures that your website's contents are fully crawlable and provides direct links to each webpage you want the search engine spiders to index. Sites such as forums, blogs and newsletters offer a variety of opinions and conclusions about what SEO tactics work, and what doesn't, with the search engines.

The reason for these differing opinions is that each search engine has its own way of measuring relevance. They each developed their own short list of factors that allows them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information. These indicators are updated, upgraded or made obsolete on a regular basis. What happens to these indicators often creates SEO myths that only add confusion to this inexact science.

SEO Myths Busted

Below are five popular misperceptions about SEO that have been debunked. Nonetheless, they still persist among SEO practitioners and continue to derail search engine optimization efforts.

FICTION: There are only one or two factors that are important. If I use them I will get the top rankings on the search engines.

FACT: Search engines use over 200 factors to rank websites. A balanced SEO strategy that utilizes as many factors as possible will achieve better results for your website.

FICTION: The meta-keywords tag must include your target keywords. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on this meta-tag and use it to determine which keywords your site should rank.

FACT: Google and Yahoo place very little value in the meta-keywords tag because of its long history of spamming. It holds so little value that many SEO Companies don't even bother with it anymore.

FICTION: Keyword density, repeating your targeted keyword as many times as possible on your website, improves your search engine rankings.

FACT: Your targeted keywords should be included a few times on the page, especially in the title and page elements like H1 and H2 tags. But keyword density is well known as a spamming technique that in the end does nothing for you.

You would be better off writing content for your human visitors. Web content that is well-written and well-presented can attract links and bring traffic to your site.

FICTION: Search engines rely heavily on link popularity to determine their rankings. Getting as many inbound links as you can is crucial in search engine optimization.

FACT: Link popularity can be beneficial if it's done correctly. Having volumes of inbound links, without regarding their source and other factors, no longer works.

Links from sites relevant to your field or industry, with the proper anchor text and relevant surrounding text, pointing to original content on your site are much more helpful. When it comes to link popularity, it's about quality not quantity.

FICTION: The PageRank value displayed by the Google Toolbar is useful for SEO.

FACT: The Google Toolbar doesn't display the actual PageRank PR) value that Google uses internally for its indexing operations. Google has already stated that PageRank has no impact on search engine results.

PR values are published 3 or 4 times a year. The PR value displayed in the toolbar was probably calculated more than several months ago. Between then and now, it may have incurred several internal adjustments that would have affected the actual PR value. Therefore, it's impossible to use the Toolbar PR value to determine useful for the optimization of a webpage.

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