subject: SEO Myths Exposed [print this page] The science of getting ranked with the search engines or SEO to be precise has evolved over the past many years. And when something grows huge, there is a lot of misinformation floating around that you should aware of. A lot of the SEO stories you hear, while appearing to be the truth and even quite scary, are nothing more than a myth. We will be debunking some of these myths in this article.
One common but quite odd SEO story is that PPC advertising will have an impact on how your site performs in the SERPs. This fact is quite untrue. There are many people who think they can improve the ranking of their website in the search engine pages by running PPC campaigns. What you need to keep in mind is that PPC and SERP rankings have no influence on each other. This is why it is a mistake to spend money on PPC based on the assumption that your site will rank better. What you should focus on, instead, to make sure your site's rank increases is building backlinks and adding quality content. Use your common sense and be practical when deciding whether or not this story is accurate.
Search engine optimization is not a way to trick or fool the search engines to get you ranked but still many new marketers believe it to be that. If you set out to deceive the search engines, however, you will also be deceiving your target audience. If people find your site after being misled, they are not likely to be the kind of targeted visitors you need. What SEO really involves is not tricking the search engines but providing them with the kind of quality backlinks and optimized content that they like.
There's nothing wrong with using tactics to help you as long as they are legitimate and not based on false ideas. Don't make the mistake of thinking short term, so use methods that will help you over the long haul.
Still another common SEO myth is that you cannot have tables in your HTML code. There is no truth in this. The fact is, the search engines have no problem spidering HTML tables, and they never did. Search engines will recognize table code when crawling, so this is not an issue to be concerned about. Still, the idea that you can rank better with designs without tables persists among web developers, even though it isn't true.
The myths we covered, while common, should not make your SEO efforts any harder than they already are. When you're starting to promote your site or any site with the search engines, it's important to make sure that you know what the truth is, so that you may put your efforts in the right direction.
