ptg16476052SEO Techniques 69525
Myths and Facts About SEO
There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings surrounding SEO. Some of these things
used to be true but are no longer, and others were never true. The following are some of
the most persistent myths about SEO and some facts that people don’t believe, but really
are true:
n Myth: You must submit your site to search engines. Back in the 1990s, search
engines were just getting started, and many of them didn’t have effective spiders
that could wander the Web at will. So, web page owners had to submit their sites to
the search engine indexes for inclusion. Since 2001, however, submitting your site
to search engines has become completely unnecessary. You can still submit your
sites if you want, but it won’t help you rank higher.
n Myth: You must use meta tags. Back in the early days of the Web, meta tags
were considered the only way to get search engine ranking. You were expected to
post meta keywords and a meta description tag on every page that you wrote, and
search engines would then use that information to both index your site and describe
it in their results. These days, the keywords tag is universally ignored as the spam
technique it became, and the description is typically ignored in favor of the visible
content on the page. Focus on writing a descriptive title, headline, and body copy
and leave the meta tags for things like your character set.
n Myth: Keyword density gets you higher rankings. This has been disproved over
and over, yet many SEO experts continue to recommend that you increase the num-
ber of times a keyword phrase is mentioned on your page. I think the reason it’s
still so popular is that it’s easy to check. But you’ll get much better rankings from
one link to your site from another high-quality site on the same topic.
n Myth: Paid search affects your rankings in organic search. Many people
believe that the search engines deliberately penalize sites that don’t advertise with
them or pay them in some other fashion. But in fact, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! all
have walls around the arms of their companies that work with search and advertis-
ing for exactly this reason.
n Fact: Cloaking can get your site removed from the search engine results.
Cloaking is a technique in which one type of content is shown to human visitors
and another type of content is shown to the search engines. The simplest form of
cloaking is hiding text in the HTML that your site visitors can’t see, such as in
comments. More complex forms use programs to detect the search engine spider
and deliberately show it different content from what a non-spider would see. It is
possible to cloak website content for a positive reason, such as to improve user