SEO myths become larger every year. Some are based partially in
reality, and others have spread because it’s often difficult to prove
what particular SEO action caused a resulting search engine reaction.
For example, you might make a change to something on a page of your
site, and a few days later notice that your ranking in Google for a
particular keyword phrase has changed. You might naturally assume that
your page change is what caused the ranking change. But that’s not
necessarily so. There are numerous reasons why your ranking may have
changed, and in many cases they actually have nothing to do with
anything that you did.
Mixing up cause and effect is one of the most common things new SEOs
do. If it were affecting only their own work, it wouldn’t be so bad, but
unfortunately, the clueless often spread their misinformation to other
unsuspecting newbies on forums and blogs, which in turn creates new
myths. It’s always interesting to see how people are so willing to
believe anything they have read or heard without ever checking it out
for themselves.
Myth 1:
You should submit your URLs to search
engines. This may have helped once upon a time, but it’s been at least 5
or 6 years since that’s been necessary.
Myth 2:
You need a Google Sitemap. If your site was
built correctly, i.e., it’s crawler-friendly, you certainly don’t need a
Google Sitemap. It won’t hurt you to have one, and you may be
interested in Google’s other Webmaster Central Tools, but having a
Google Sitemap isn’t going to get you ranked better.
Myth 3:
You need to update your site frequently.
Frequent updates to your pages may increase the search engine crawl
rate, but it won’t increase your rankings. If your site doesn’t need to
change, don’t change it just because you think the search engines will
like it better. They won’t. In fact, some of the highest ranking sites
in Google haven’t been touched in years.
Myth 4:
PPC ads will help/hurt rankings. This one is
funny to me because about half the people who think that running Google
AdWords will affect their organic rankings believe that they will bring
them down; the other half believe they will bring them up. That alone
should tell you that neither is true!
Myth 5:
Your site will be banned if you ignore
Google’s guidelines. There’s nothing in Google’s webmaster guidelines
that isn’t common sense. You can read them if you like, but it’s not
mandatory in order to be an SEO. Just don’t do anything strictly for
search engines that you wouldn’t do anyway, and you’ll be fine. That
said, the Google guidelines are much better than they used to be, and
may even provide you with a few good tidbits of advice.
Myth 6:
Your site will be banned if you buy links.
This one does have some roots in reality, as Google likes to scare
people about this. They rightly don’t want to count paid links as votes
for a page if they can figure out that they are paid, but they often
can’t. Even if they do figure it out, they simply won’t count them. It
would be foolish of them to ban entire sites because they buy
advertising on other sites.
Myth 7:
H1 (or any header tags) must be used for
high rankings. There’s very little (if any) evidence to suggest that
keywords in H tags actually affect rankings, yet this myth continues to
proliferate. My own tests don’t seem to show them making a difference,
although it’s difficult to know for sure. Use H tags if it works with
your design or content management system, and don’t if it doesn’t. It’s
doubtful you’ll find it makes a difference one way or the other.
Myth 8:
Words in your meta keyword tag have to be
used on the page. I used to spread this silly myth myself many years
ago. The truth is that the Meta keyword tag was actually designed to be
used for keywords that were NOT already on the page, not the opposite!
Since this tag is ignored by Google and used only for uncommon words in
Yahoo, it makes little difference at this point anyway.
Myth 9:
SEO copy must be 250 words in length. This
one is interesting to me because I am actually the one who made up the
250 number back in the late ’90s. However, I never said that 250 was the
exact number of words you should use, nor did I say it was an optimal
number. It’s simply a good number to be able to write a nice page of
marketing copy that can be optimized for 3-5 keyword phrases. Shorter
copy ranks just as well, as does longer copy. Use as many or as few
words as you need to use to say what you need to say.
Myth 10:
You need to optimize for the long tail. No,
you don’t. By their very nature, long-tail keyword phrases are
uncompetitive; meaning that not many pages are using those words, and
not that many people are searching for them in the engines. Because of
this, ranking for long-tail keywords is easy – simply include them
somewhere in a blog post or an article, and you’ll rank for them. But
that’s not optimization.
