5 myths about SEO

I read an article on a dutch website, Website 24/7. It discussed five myths about SEO. I decided to translate those myths, so more people can use it when optimizing there websites. Keep in mind there are a lot of articles found about SEO and they probably have some kind of truth in it. However, the myths below are true for me and therefor I would advice you to keep these in mind when doing your SEO or looking for a company that offers it.

Myth 1: You only have to optimize your site once

That’s just plain wrong. Like any other kind of promotion the process continues from time to time. Just after you finished your SEO you’ll see a positive effect, but when you stop optimizing it will fade, because of competitors that are optimizing there websites too.

When you are optimizing your website you’ll get better positions in the search results at first. If, after that, nothing happens anymore and you don’t update your website, Google will loose interest. Competitors who are updating there sites will get the advantage then.

Myth 2: directory site links are helpful to get a top position

Well they aren’t! A lot of company’s offer to put your link in like 1000 directory’s. With those 1000 links you would conquer a top position in Google. Unfortunately these sort of links don’t help at all. Most of these directory’s are irrelevant for Google and others aren’t around long enough. And you don’t want to have your site related to those irrelevant websites.

Myth 3: Your keywords should feature a lot on your website

Website 24/7 has a nice example about this. Well it’s sort of logical that Google doubts about your site when it’s about lawnmowers and the word lawnmower isn’t around on the website at all. But it isn’t necessary to repeat your keywords every third rule of text. This doesn’t have a lot of effect and it makes the text harder to read which will cause visitors to leave your website.

Keep in mind that a lot of SEO company’s are still doing this. It used to be very effective but not anymore!

Myth 4: meta tags

It’s possible to add meta tags on every page you have. These tags give Google an idea what the page is about, it used to at least. The problem with meta tags is, that a search engine needs to trust you about the content of these tags.  Unfortunately people have abused meta tags a lot to get a better result so most search engine don’t use meta tags anymore.

Myth 5: Pagerank shows you how your website will score

Pagerank is an estimation Google gives at websites, but it doesn’t show the order you’ll appear in the results. It’s just an indication. Your true results are only known to Google . Hence, it could well be that pages with a  higher pagerank are lower in the results than pages with a lower pagerank. In addition, a Google pagerank is for a page, not a whole website!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 09:56 and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.