SEO Myth Demystified
Myths exist everywhere. The SEO industry too is not immune to such myths. It is important to know these myths so as to distinguish between the necessary and the unnecessary things in the world of Search Engine Optimization. It is also important to know about these myths so as to avoid falling a prey to them.
Repeating keywords means more higher ranking in a search result: False. 'Keyword' placement and density do play an important part in attaining higher search rankings. But that does not warrant the stuffing up of contents with many keywords. Doing so might lead to the website getting lower rankings or being penalized. One should also remember that one is writing for humans and not search engines.
Meta tags are the only vital component: Meta tags do play a role when the spiders of a search engine are crawling. However, a search engine's spider considers many other aspects rather than just concentrating on meta tags. Meta tags loaded with keywords are a sure shot way of lowering the rankings of the website in a search engine result. This is because such keyword stuffed tags are considered as Spam by many search engines.
More links leads to higher page rank: This is another myth associated with SEO. Though links are important, it is necessary to remember that the website must have quality links. These links must be related to the content of the website. Linking to anything and everything might just aid in lowering the rankings. Even link exchange program or free-for-all link damages the site's chances of achieving a good ranking. Explanation given by Google.
"Linking schemes will often do a site more harm than good. Many sites that advertise link-sharing programs not only offer little value, but will distribute your email address without your permission, resulting in an increased volume of unwanted mail" -
Hidden links and text increases the search result rankings: Many people tend to have a wrong notion that including hidden links and text will help the site to feature in many search results which in turn will increase traffic to the website. Hidden links and text are considered as a serious offence by search engines and might lead to penalties or worse, banning of the site.
Submission to a many search engines will do the trick: People have the fallacy that if a site is submitted to all the search engines it will rank higher. This is not the case. If the content is good and the site is built in a search engine friendly manner, one does not have to submit to the all the search engines that exist. Submitting to major search engines will prove more than enough.
After doing SEO, the rankings remain the same: This is another myth that prevails in the mind of people. It is not necessary that a high ranking obtained by a website will remain constant. The spiders are constantly changing their criteria for searching and indexing websites. Also many new sites are always coming up and old sites are made search engine friendly. This affects the search engine rankings of a given website.
Website should be left untouched after a higher ranking has been achieved: Many people believe that the site and its content should remain untouched after the site has achieved higher rankings. This is not true. The truth is search engine spiders love new content and new content leads to an increased number of visits by the spiders. However, one should bear in mind that if too many changes are made to the same page leading to an increase in the keywords, it might lead to the lowering of the rankings. Hence one should try to add new content, new sections, and new features to a site. Also the old content should be archived.
Search engines are unable to index Flash: While search engines may be unable to index Flash itself, however if the text of a Flash movie is written in HTML, they will definitely index the text as well as other matter present on the page.
SEO is a super quick way to attain higher rankings: Well, the answer is, not at all! It takes a certain period of time for the SEO process to show its effect. One has to remember that even search engines take some time to visit the website as they have to search and index millions of new websites.
A sitemap is not necessary: A sitemap is not necessary, is a notion that exists in the mind of many. However the truth is the opposite. Site maps tell the search engines about the pages which exist on a website. The rankings in a search result are also based on the content. Keeping this in mind, a sitemap allows the website to submit those pages where the content is the strongest. Sitemap is helpful if the contents of the site are dynamic and the links cannot be discovered easily. Similarly robots.txt files are important as they instruct the crawlers of a search engine about the pages which are not supposed to be indexed.
