SEO Myths and Misconceptions

This video goes over chapter 9 of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO.  The videos cover the chapter in two parts. Part starts with 6 basic myths.

Six Basic SEO Myths

These are some of the most basic myths according to SEOmoz that their research has confirmed.

Search Engine Submission

This is the practice of submitting your site to search engine directories and is something that used to be normal practice. Today search crawlers do all the heavy lifting to index your content as long as you set yourself up properly (ie:xml sitemap etc…). So there is no need to submit to a search engine directory any more.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are important but are not the only consideration anymore.

Your Meta Title tag and Description Tag still carry weight in SEO.  The Keyword meta tag no longer has much authority. That said I still put in Meta keywords for the discipline of doing it and because if things change and they come back into vogue, I won’t have to go back and add them.

Keyword Stuffing and Density

The practice of loading your content with lots of the same keywords is no longer effective.  In the old days people would game the system by loading keywords in the meta tag and cloak them. None of that works any more, so don’t bother.

Also, the practice of using a keyword with a frequency as a percentage of your word count, the practice of keyword density, no longer brings any advantage either.  This according to the testing done at SEOmoz.

Paid Search Helps Organic Results

If you run a paid campaign (PPC) and rank on  page one for that ad and keyword, your organic ranking will also be helped for that keyword.  Wrong!  It doesn’t work that way.

Personalization

With the introduction of personalization, you results in organic returns are skewed and you don’t see clean results. That is only true for the specific and repeated searches you perform during the course of your activity online. But since your activity covers only a fraction of the total searching going on, your results will not be greatly affected overall in the organic returns.

My personal experience does not bear this out.  As a marketer I search far and wide looking for niche possibilities, so to avoid skewed results I always log out of my personal account and look at results with out personalization turned on.

Reciprocal Links

The practice of exchanging links with another webmaster is no longer effective. So don’t waste your time with it.

The Video

The video below goes over these points in greater detail so have a look.  It should help you determine where to put your efforts and make better use of your time.

That’s it. Hope this is helpful.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

About Claude Pelanne

Claude Pelanne is an internet marketer and consultant who comes out of television broadcast. He works with start ups and small business to optimize their online business.