Wednesday, 22 August 2007
/ Kshitij Ahuja
The list below are the myths that i came across while learning SEO. They might not apply to all, but are the most common ones i came across.
| 1. | Hiding text will improve my rankings. |
| | Stuffing the page with keywords is bad, but if you hide the keywords with same background as that of page, it won't be good enough either.
Well, that might be have been true some ages back. Now, search engines are intelligent enough to catch keywords stuffing even if they hidden with the same background color or any other way. And if you are caught, needless to say, you might be banned for every from the Search Engine database. | | 2. | Meta Tags are very important part of site. | | | Not true. But yes, they were once. Now many search engines don’t consider meta tags. And bad thing is that incase you use meta tags, stuffed with lots of keywords which do not match the context of the page or text in the body tag, you might be banned by the SE for spamming/keyword stuffing. | | 3. | One should use as many possible keywords in web pages. | | | The webpage you are optimizing should ideally be optimized for at most 3 keywords. The reason is that when you begin with SEO, you should concentrate of small fraction of keywords rather than a whole big lot. The more links (and anchors) from other pages you have using those few keywords, more votes you get for those keywords. Needless to say if you choose large keywords, you will get few votes for each keyword which is not going to help that much. | | 4. | Search engines cannot index pages with Flash (and images) and using Flash in your page will hamper its PR | | | It is true that search engines cannot index flash and images. However in both case you can use descriptive text which will be parsed by the bots along with the rest of the html. Same case applies with images. The “alt” tag can be used for descriptive text and it will be no doubt read by search engines.
But yes, one point to keep in mind is that there should not be auto-redirect of the page. This is not only for page containing flash, but in general too. Therefore it is always better to add as “skip-intro” link when embedding flash in the pages rather than an auto redirect.
| | 5. | Once I list at the top, it will be all fine. | | | Not at all. SEO is a continuous, ongoing, never lasting process. It requires continuous efforts to optimize pages to meet the growing competition and keep pace with the latest rankings. Also search engines, particularly Google keeps updating its search algorithms in order to keep unethical practices adopted by some seo experts at bay. | | 6. | Should submit to at least 1000 Search Engines. | | | Not true. There are only a few major SEs. Rest take results from these major Search Engines itself. Therefore you can afford to ignore all other SEs. | | 7. | More the reciprocal links, better will be rankings. | | | True. False. True because quality inbound links are required as they are considered as a vote from the site they are on to the site they point to.
False because people tend to add links to so many directories and link farms which Search Engines consider "bad-neighborhood". Result is clear, your site could be penalized. Also I have observed for many link directories that the page where our site link appears has either PageRank (PR) 0 or it is set to “no-follow” meaning spiders are directed to not to follow links in those pages. So, even if it has PR 6, it is not going to be any benefit for you in terms of PR. | | 8. | PageRank is everything | | | Most of the search engines, specifically Google, considers a lot of other things besides page rank. What matters more is the content of page, the quality inbound links, and many other factors. PageRank alone is not the only deciding factor for how well your page is suitable for a particular keyword when searched. | | 9. | New sites don't have a chance in the search engines | | | Not true. As I said above, there are a lot of factors that are considered like content, back linking etc. If you follow the step by step procedure and do it in an ethical way, you can be listed well in search engines, quite easily and early. | | 10. | Dynamic pages need to look static. | | | Google recognizes a lot of page extensions including the commonly used languages like php, asp etc. It is not true that dynamic sites are not indexed properly or that they need to look like static ones. | I really don't want to stop here. There is so much people have wrongly incepted about seo that it will takes a year to compile the whole list, and this just doesn't stops. The list is growing. :) |
