SEO Myths And Mistakes

In my previous entry I have posted a list of the most important SEO tips for small business owners and starting webmasters. However, it would be appropriate to mention the other side of the coin, too. There are many SEO myths and mistakes around the Web and often it is difficult to determine whether certain technique really does work or it is just one of many common myths. Some of these myths are at least partially based in reality but there is a lot of crazy ones that are just plain fantasy.

Bellow I have listed common SEO myths and mistakes you should try to avoid at all costs. I will be keeping this post updated and possibly adding more myths and mistakes in the future.

SEO Myths

1. Search engines are not as good as other media. Several studies show there is a huge confusion about what really works in online marketing and what is worth investing money. An overwhelming majority of people is using search engines to find what they are looking for on the Web. Therefor, search engines outperform all other marketing methods in amounts of traffic they can bring. Search engines provide possibly the most targeted traffic and potential clients and customers who are actually looking to pursache products or services you offer. Finally, traffic from search engines tends to be long-term and usually of a higher quality.

2. SEO is a single event. Definately not! There might have been a little truth in that statement a dozen years ago when it was enough to fill your web pages with keywords, submit them to search engines and keep the meta tags updated. However, there is exactly zero truth in that statement now. Search engines take into consideration hundreds of different factors to determine the relevancy of web pages and to decide their position in SERPs. Submissions and meta tags have lost their importance. Add in the (extremely quickly) increasing number of competiting websites (plus numerous blogs, forums, social networks or media sites). Long story short – SEO today is an ongoing process and requires permanent attention in order to be effective.

3. Meta tags and submissions is where it’s at. You ave certainly heard this one many times. There are many websites claiming that meta tags and submissions to search engines are crucial for SEO. Don’t believe that. This might have been true in once upon a time when search engines were still just jumping off (late 90′s). Back then, it was important to submit your site and meta tags description and keywords had some importance. But today, search engines use highly sophisticated algorithms and very advanced bots. There is no need to manually submit your site, bots will very likely find it themselves. Moreover, meta tags have lost their importance. They are no longer taken into consideration by major search engines (though I still recommend you to use both – you never know, Google might change their algorithms tomorrow and meta tags might become more essential).

4. PPC ads help/hurt SEO. Many people believe that running Google AdWords can affect organic rankings of their site. Some believe it will bring their site up, some believe it will bring their site down. Both opinions are based on thin air. PPC ads have nothing to do with SEO and have no influence on organic rankings.

5. Multiple domain names. This is a often abused on the Web by people who think that publishing their content on more websites will help them rank better. That is a very dangerous opinion. First of all, search engines penalize duplicate content, therefor you are more likely to lose your position in SERPs. Secondly, let’s outline the tremendous amount of work necessary to build, maintain and achieve high rankings for these multiple websites. The cost of the domain names and web hosting alone would be very expensive. On top of that, imagine optimizing and building link popularity for all those websites. To conclude, the strategy of multiple domain names do not return a single positive effect and should be avoided.

6. You must update your website frequently. Some of the highest ranking websites in Google haven’t been updated in years. Frequent updates will probably increase the search engine crawl rate but won’t help your website rank better. If your site doesn’t need a change, don’t change it.

7. Your site will be banned if you buy links. This myth is rooted in reality. Search engines (especially Google – and Matt Cutts) don’t want to count paid links as votes for a page. The problem is there is no efficient way to figure out whether the link is paid or not. Even if they somehow figure it out, they won’t ban the entire site. It would be silly to ban entire websites because of few advertisements. They just won’t count those links.

8. You can do SEO yourself. Even though this might be true in some cases, most of the time it is not. While SEO does not include any extremely difficult techniques, it is very easy (especially for beginners without much experience) to pick up the wrong ones. This may lead to wasted efforts. Before you start working on promoting your site, you should read as much online resources as you can. Compare information from various trusted sources. If you are not sure about something, don’t hesitate to ask at various SEO related webmaster forums.

SEO Mistakes

1. Not knowing your keywords. The most common mistake. People often use keywords or keyword phrases that are, in their minds, descriptive of their website. However, an average user might use completely different words while searching for your product. You cannot just think on your own. If you want to be successful, you ought to use some decent keyword suggestion tool. For detailed explanation of a keyword selection process see Choosing The Right Keywords.

2. Empty pages (lack of content). Very common mistake, too. All search engines are almost strictly text-driven (i.e. they see websites as a plain text). Spiders, while crawling the Web, are primary looking for a quality, non-duplicate content. Without it, it’s virtually impossible to achieve high organic rankings.

3. Ignoring title and h1 tags. Leaving the title tag empty and/or not including h1 heading on your pages is quite common. These two tags are extremely important. You should include your keywords in them if possible. Furthermore, a text in your title tag shows in search results as your page title.

4. Frames-based website. Frames disrupt fundamental concepts of the Internet: individual pages linked together with hypertext. Each page should have an individual URL, and could be used as a stand-alone entity, with navigation integrated into it. Frames mess up horribly with these concepts. What is more crucial – search engines hate frames as they have problems reading content from them.

5. A flash website without HTML alternative. Flash is a wonderful technology. You can create incredibly beautiful websites using Flash. However, while attractive to humans, search engines do not like Flash-based websites. Spiders have problems reading content from them, therefor they are often not able to index it. If you really insist on a Flash-based website, definitely provide also a HTML version.

6. JavaScript menus. Search engines do not read JavaScript. You should avoid JavaScript for a navigation unless it is completely necessary. When you are going to use JavaScript menu (invisible to search engines), make sure all your pages are crawlable. You can consider building a sitemap containing links to all pages.

7. Dynamic URLs. Do not underestimate importance of a good URL. Even today, dynamic page names are very frequent. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without SEO friendly URLs but all being equal, keywords in the URL will give you an additional advantage over competition. Keywords in URLs are more important for Yahoo! and MSN but even Google takes them into consideration.

8. Broken links. Linking to non-existing web pages is a bad thing. People and search engines hate that.

9. Backlink spamming. It is a common delusion that quantity matters more than quality whenbuilding backlinks. Because of this, many unexperienced webmasters resort to link farms, forum/newsgroup/blog spam etc, which may possibly lead to getting their site penalized or banned. In fact, you may need just a couple of quality backlinks to rank better. Always go for quality backlinks from trusted authority websites.

10. Blackhat SEO! Unethical (blackhat) SEO techniques – not only they don’t work as supposed most of the time, they often eventuate in search engine penalizations (or in the worst case they can lead to your website being permanently banned).