Search Engine Myths Exposed

The most important thing about search engine optimization (SEO) is that nothing and I mean nothing is constant. And with the passing of time there are myths that have cropped up that trick people into making the wrong choices and waste time and money, your two most important recourses.

The first and maybe the most damaging myth is that of Guaranteed Success. There is no guarantee in SEOs. Don’t believe the guaranteed get you on the top 10 of Google search boasts out of companies. Sure maybe on your or your companies name but on key words. Nope not going to happen that easily.

Second is Meta Tag Keywords. After years of mystery surrounding the issue of Meta tag keywords, you can sleep tonight; Google does not use this data to determine your search engine results. While you might want to use Meta tag keywords as a reference guide to keep track of the words and terms you want to be optimizing for individual pages, don’t rely on them to capture that elusive first (page) listing. BUT, Yahoo does apparently continue to use Meta tag keywords and as for Bing, the jury is still out. So yes keep your Meta tag keywords accurate and up to date, as this might offer some form of insurance just in case some search engines do factor the Meta tags into their algorithms.

Third; Meta Tag Descriptions. If we go back to 2007 and e3arlier almost every SEO was talking about the proper length of your Meta tag descriptions. And then at the same time the Meta tag description that was displayed was always the few lines of text specified by the site owner, but once again that has changed! Google’s algorithm now picks up matching lines and phrases in the page content itself that is related to the search and displays a selective part of that content on the SERP’s little one liner. So, sigh, be sure to do your keyword research when preparing your NEW content.

Forth, is Keyword Density. Yes copy and paste fans, during the evolution of the SEO someone did notice that specific keyword density helped in optimizing content. So as you might have already guessed every SEO picked up on that little trick and while there are probably was some truth to that practice at the time, the search engine spiders started getting smarter and were able to catch patterns, such as the practice of having invisible text over or under your page of your key words repeated over and over. Now, while ensuring the content of the page being optimized includes your keywords, the density matters more to the myth that reality

Fifth is Dynamic URL’s. The big 3 (Google, Yahoo & Bing) have made some major strides in how to manage dynamic URL’s (A URL that results from the search of a database-driven Web site or the URL of a Web site that runs a script) so duplicate content is much less a concern in today’s search engine world. Today they are converted to a more SEO friendly format including canonical link tags that tell the search engines to index the preferred URL and not the long, dynamic one.

Sixth is Flash. It is not there yet but search engines, Google in particular are getting better at indexing Flash based content there is still a long way to go. Being a lover of designing sites in Flash, I am half smiling. It used to be that having an all Flash website was death when it came to your sites ranking. But the reality is still that using a Flash only site gives you fewer options for SEOs compared to content rich pages. This does not mean it is bad. It means that you need to focus on other SEO factors to get good results.

Larson Notes & Satyr: All you need to remember is that the web of 2 years ago is not the web of today. Heck, just wait as Facebook and Twitter start to get searched. If you are active in those arenas all your work, waiting and time sacrifice might start to pay off. Well, maybe.

Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
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