Search engine optimization is the life blood of any business web site. It is natural that business owners want to get the most out of their SEO efforts, but that eagerness to succeed leaves them vulnerable to some common SEO myths that are blatantly false. These SEO myths can actually draw traffic away from a web site and can cause the web based business to lose money. Many of the most common myths are spread by SEO companies that should be helping a business,but hurt it instead.
One of the most common SEO myths is that site must use meta tags to place high in search engine results. When the Internet was in its infancy, search engines did use meta tags to categorize web sites, but people found out a way to work the meta tag system to their advantage. Because of the past history of meta tag abuse, major search engines like Google do not place much importance on meta tags. Properly inserted meta tags won’t hurt a page’s ranking, but it won’t help it much, either.
Another common SEO myth is the myth of multiple domain addresses. Some businesses build mirror sites and park them at URLs similar to their original web site. This is actually very harmful to a web site page ranking. Many major search engines penalize mirror web sites. Google refuses to list web sites with identical content. There is also additional costs and web site maintenance that makes this strategy ineffective and expensive.
Many search engine optimization companies promise permanently high page rankings. There isn’t anyway to guarantee top search engine placement indefinitely. Search engine results are calculated using an algorithm and the constant addition of result in a regular shifting of page rankings. A correctly optimized page will benefit from placement near the top of the search engine results, but the placement can vary by as much as five to seven places.
Many SEO companies will offer to submit a site directly to the major search engines to ensure optimum placement in the page rankings. Submitting web sites to search engines is free and it is easy to do. Submitting a site to search engines isn’t enough to guarantee a high page rank. A web site page will still need to have appropriate keywords and keyword density.
Another SEO myth s that the use of Flash on a web site harms its search engine rankings. This is not true. Web sites that have an over reliance on Flash and don’t concentrate on good, keyword rich web copy do have a hard time gaining high search engine rankings. Flash should be used judiciously to create visual appeal, but not to the exclusion of text and keywords.
If a web site is going to be successful, search engine optimization is a must, but web site owners should steer clear of shady practices. Not all practices are shady, many are just ineffective and waste time and money. Web masters should educate themselves on the basics of SEO and on the pitfalls of implementing effective search engine optimization practices on their web sites.
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March 7th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
First, until this post, I was still thinking Meta keywords are important.
Second, my Uncle uses 3 domains for one business. We didn’t know about this at all. Is it really bad to have multiple domain? My uncle wants to dominate his niche by taking all domains. Let me know.
This surely is an eye-opening article.
March 9th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Good question. I think it would depend on how he uses those domains. Is one a primary domain and the other two redirect to the main website or are all separate websites and if so, are each different?
March 17th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
As someone who has a keen interest in SEO, I think this article pretty much dispels a lot of the myths which have been kicking around the web ever since I started building sites and think it would be excellent for beginners to read. Of course, I’d like to try and falsely perpetuate the Flash myth - the less Flash on the web, the better.
April 14th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Hi,
thanks for all the explanations, they are very well said. But I have to say something about flash sites….ok you can go and fill your meta=”keywords” tag with words….but I recently heard that google bans site with massive keywords listed. Best of all is to have your content indexed, and google-bot cannot read inside flash movies. I don’t say not to use flash at all. But use it in a moderate way….a header, 2-3 animations, DO NOT make your site an entire movie if you wanna be “googled”. And make a very good use of the meta=”description” tag , as the content of that will be listed in the search results. In the beginning I used to ignore that tag and saw that my site in google looked funny as the description was something like …my menu buttons or alt names from my header images…. It’s a pretty hard work, I don’t think beside web masters and SEO masters, is anyone that can say it’s an easy job….no way
Good luck.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:52 am
Well I’ve read a lot of SEO articles, E-books and even advices on forums and most of them are the same, this topic is really helpful and I think the topic I’ve read that SEO is a lazy persons game is not true.
April 21st, 2008 at 1:50 am
I don’t think that meta tags are that important so I never bother to create one whenever I’m creating a new article on my site. I like doing SEO like forum signature, blog commenting, passing my site to those social sites. I believe that this is the best thing to do because a search engine likes to crawl it for updates.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I think the point about flash movies is true — and it would be true for other kinds of graphics and pictures as well. If some critical keyword is only inside a picture then Google is not going to see it. So what you want to do is have good content to go along with whatever kind of movies or pictures you put up.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Good insights on SEO marketing especially about meta tags and the use of multiple domains. Besides deliberate black hat practices, innocent mistakes highlighted above also hurts businesses and results in failure to secure good search results placement.
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:48 am
I agree that sites that like to promise a high ranking couldn’t deliver what they promised because search engines like Google is very selfish and they didn’t want other companies making cash out of their page rank. I think that this is the same reason that has made them on pursuing Payperpost in the first place.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:42 pm
The meta tags thing still works with yahoo and msn and other search engines but not with google, which is what matters the most. Its better to focus on keyword density, just don’t overdo it, and get back links. Try to get anchored backlinks if you want to get more authority for a keyword. This can help people find you through google.
May 25th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Not to mention that when the algorithm gets leaked and abused, it gets changed, and the order is FUBAR for a week or so.
If the companies were to collaborate, they could get a huge list of malicious and cheating websites and have them permanently barred from the search results listings.
May 26th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Too true. In some ways I think it’s great that Google changes its algorithm. They created it for their own purposes and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who use it to game the system (without really providing quality content). Of course it does make it harder for those of us just trying to improve our search results as well as our content.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:05 am
Some very good points made. No seo consultant can absolutely guarantee a webmaster of ranking on the first page forever for a certain set of keywords unless they are updated with the changes the search engines employ, even the experimental algorithms. Yes, the metatags hardly help any these days and not many webmasters, who have been around for a while, are big on the metatags.
June 17th, 2008 at 5:54 am
Also, a lot of sites tend to clutter their title tags with highly searched keywords. Google is known to ignore such sites and treats them as spam… Great article.
June 22nd, 2008 at 9:20 pm
If you are using the domains to complement each of the other and they are not all identical then I would not see too much of a problem. But if the second portion was used then I might see how it would be affected in the search engines. I do not believe that SEO is the life bloodline of a business website, but it can help most sites. If you are able to use other marketing avenues like you would in physical businesses then you may not need to worry about SEO at all. Although it would not hurt any if you did.