Search engine optimization can be thought of as the biggest open secret in Internet marketing. While most of us know about it at varying degrees, search engines like the high and mighty Google still don’t talk about it openly. A search engine’s algorithm set is top secret and mere mortals like us aren’t meant to know all we want to know so that we don’t end up destroying the search engine world as we know it.
For the most part, the level of secrecy in search engines and how they rank websites is a good thing, but it’s human nature to speculate about the unknown and a lot of times, it becomes hard to tell the truth apart from the half-truths and full lies. As such, I’ve seen a lot of SEO myths take over the community, fooling upstart site owners into spending a lot of time and money doing tasks that will never help them carve a viable presence in their online niches.
Today, I’ll help you steer clear of some of the biggest pieces of baloney that the SEO world has come up with. Those of you in the know may think some of the items here are absurd, but you’ll be surprised at how many people still practice them:
1. Optimizing your meta keywords – This is the grand daddy of ‘em all. Meta tags used to be a big search engine optimization factor in the SPAMela Anderson era, but that was more than a decade ago and search engines have gotten a whole lot smarter since then. While adding meta keywords to each page’s code isn’t necessarily a bad practice, it serves no real purpose in a war for top keyword rankings in a competitive niche. You’re better off having your nails done because this tactic is practically a waste of time in today’s Internet.
2. Pipes versus hyphens in title tags – As silly as it sounds, I’ve heard people argue about which special characters are best for separating keywords in a title tag. Some preach the use of hyphens and others have championed the “pipe” or “|” mark. It’s been a drawn out debate for years and nobody has really proven anything.
Fellas, give it a rest.
Google and most major search engines are agnostic to these things. It doesn’t matter if you use spaces, pipes or hyphens. As long as the prime keywords that correspond to the topic of the page’s content are present within the first 60 characters of the title tag, Google sees them and that will count.
3. Reciprocal linking with shady link directories - You’ve probably encountered link directories that ask for a backlink from you before they give you one from them. If you agreed to this, you’ve been conned. Get on your CMS and take their links out of your pages — NOW.
Reciprocal linking yields very questionable value to a website’s ability to rank. Add to that the fact that the link directory you just partnered up with is already linking to hundreds of other sites and it’s easy to figure out that you’ve exchanged a bucket of your good link juice for a droplet of theirs.
And their juice isn’t even good.
4. I have AdSense and I use AdWords. I’ll be indexed faster and I’ll rank better – A weird rumor in SEO boards once made a lot of SEOs very paranoid. Some bozos claimed that having Google ads and using Google AdWords somehow curries the favor of the search engine and gives you an edge against organic competitors.
This is simply not true. According to a statement from Google itself:
To be crystal clear:
Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google; and
buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.
I don’t know bout y’all, but between an anonymous poster and Mother G, I’m taking the latter’s word any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
5. Tweaking the crawl rate in Webmaster Tools will make Google crawl and cache the changes I make in my site faster – This is only true if your site has a high level of authority, a wide content library and your pace of adding new stuff is enough for Google to really grant you this “power”. Having a lousy site that has a history of barely posting new stuff will not result in a faster crawl rate all of a sudden. I know. I’ve tried.
6. Higher PR = better rankings – While a high Page Rank is indicative of a site’s authority and quality, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a high-PR site will rank better than lower-PR sites all the time. Remember, PR is only one of many factors in ranking. There’s also content quality, anchor linking relevance from incoming links, on-page factors, keyword usage and personalized search. Think of PR in relation to a website as strength is in relation to a boxer. You can have all the muscles in the world, but if you’re slow and you don’t have good technique, the guy across the ring will probably be boxing your ears off all night. The same is true about lower-PR sites being able to outrank higher-PR ones in a lot of cases.
7. After 6 months, my SEO work is done and my site will have good rankings – While I agree that half a year is enough time to see how you’ve progressed in your SEO campaign, it’s also a fact that different websites have different SEO needs and that puts a caveat on the amount of work needed to maximize a site’s ranking potential.
The fact that different niches have different degrees of competition also throws a big variable into the ranking equation. For instance, a site competing in the real estate niche will probably require a lot more than 6 months to slug it out with the industry’s top players compared to a site competing in the origami instruction niche. In the end, it’s all relative and SEO is not a one-time thing. Search engine algorithms and Internet trends change all the time, and it’s important that a site has a dedicated SEO who will figure out how to best adapt to the ever-transforming interwebs.
That just about does it for my SEO mythbuster episode. There are a lot of other fallacies floating around but these are the main ones you have to avoid most.
Until then,
Andy “The Truthmeister” Jenkins
P.S. Ever been duped by a SEO myth? Tell us about it in the comments section below so you can help others avoid similar experiences.
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