10 Of The Most Common Organic-seo Myths
Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines.
This may have helped once upon a time, but its been at least 5 or 6 years since thats been necessary.
Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap.
If your site was built correctly, i.e., its crawler-friendly, you certainly dont need a Google Sitemap. It wont hurt you to have one, and you may be interested in Googles other Webmaster Central Tools, but having a Google Sitemap isnt 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 wont increase your rankings. If your site doesnt need to change, dont change it just because you think the search engines will like it better. They wont. In fact, some of the highest ranking sites in Google havent 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 Googles guidelines.
Theres nothing in Googles webmaster guidelines that isnt common sense. You can read them if youd like, but its not mandatory in order to be an
SEO. Just dont do anything strictly for search engines that you wouldnt do anyway, and youll 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 (specifically Matt Cutts) likes to scare people about this. They rightly dont want to count paid links as votes for a page if they can figure out that they are paid, but they often cant. Even if they do figure it out, they simply wont 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.
Theres very little (if any) evidence to suggest that keywords in H tags actually affect rankings, yet this myth continues to proliferate. My own tests dont seem to show them making a difference, although its difficult to know for sure. Use H tags if it works with your design or content management system, and dont if it doesnt. Its doubtful youll 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. Its simply a good amount 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 dont. 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 easysimply include them somewhere in a blog post or an article, and youll rank for them. But thats not optimization.
Before you go spreading these myths or any other SEO info that you believe is true, test it many times on many sites. Even if it appears to work, keep in mind that it may not always work, or that there could be other factors involved.
by: Stuti Sabharwal
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