Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Top 40 SEO Myths You are supposed to be familiar with About – Part 1


 Myth 1: Just the First Rank Matters

Many eBooks and other resources that business owners use will place an significant emphasis on the need to be at the top of search results, whether that be on Google Search, other engines, or even in places like social media. But surveys have shown that people rather often will look at other results and they will scroll down through the page. Being on top of a second page, for example, can be quite useful for traffic. Also, search ranking is only one part of the puzzle. Now Google places other results on the page like social recommendations and local results as well, which means there are a lot of more avenues open to you, and being in first place is no longer as critical as it once was.

Myth 2: You can do SEO with no outside Help

Doing SEO simply means that you go after a set of techniques and procedures to improve the possibility that web users will go to your site. It is true that anyone can learn these techniques, and, if you are a web site owner and you want to do your own SEO, then you can use up the time to learn and apply those techniques. But SEO can be complex and touches many areas such as marketing online, coding, technical aspects and PR skills. Most business owners just do not have everything required to do a great job at SEO, and that is why so many agencies exist that offer help. An IT worker or online marketer is often not enough if you want truly good results.

Myth 3: META Tags are Very significant

It used to be that each page on your site needed Meta tags in order to rank well. Those are small pieces of code that would offer Google a list of keywords and a description. The search engine would use those to find out what your web site was regarding. Now however, those do not have an effect on your ranking at all. Both Google and Bing stopped caring about META tags awhile back. However, Meta tags are not useless. For example, the description tag is the text that frequently appears next to the link that shows up in the search results, so it still serves a useful function.

Myth 4: Keyword-Rich Domain Names are ranked upper

Back in the dotcom days, it used to be that the URL you used was very significant. Google placed a lot of importance on the domain name, and if you might get a name that had your keyword in it, you would gain a big advantage over other sites. This is why a lot of companies in the late 90′s bought domain names for a lot of money. But now, the indexing process only looks at the actual content of your pages, and not the domain name. The domain name is still important, because people still get to see it, but it will not give you a higher rank.

Myth 5: You have to suggest Your Site to Google or Other Search Engines

All search engines used to have URL submission forms where you might send your site to Google and others. In fact, they still do, but that procedure is unnecessary. The crawlers that these engines use now are sophisticated sufficient that any new site will be found in a matter of days, if not hours. The only time you would have to worry about submitting your site is if for some reason it was not indexed repeatedly after a couple of days.

Myth 6: Submitting a Sitemap will Boost Your Rankings

Google offers a webmaster interface and from there, you can submit a sitemap, which is a XML file containing links to each page on your site. Some site owners take the time to submit such a file every time they make a change, but that is not needed. Submitting a sitemap does not modify your rankings. All it does is add pages which may not have been indexed previously. If your site is typical and has links to all your pages, then it is not needed.

Myth 7: SEO has nothing to perform with Social Media

Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, SEO was the one and only technique to get traffic in an natural way. But now, social media is all over, and the line is quickly blurring between the two. While some marketers still consider SEO and social media to be dissimilar beasts, the truth is that they are very closely linked. For example, Google now places their own social network, Google Plus, into its search results. If you can get enough important people to talk about your product and link to your site, then their recommendations will show up in any Google search result that their friends do. This clearly affects SEO. On the flip side, Facebook has also entered search, by recently introducing their Open Graph engine, which searches based on friends and interests. So the two spheres are closely linked, and they are becoming closer all the time.

Myth 8: Google does not examine CSS Files

The Google bot used to be fairly primitive and only saw text, which is why many people concentrated on the text part of their web site. But now that engine is very sophisticated and reads JavaScript, CSS, and more. The crawler can certainly see whether your site’s presentation is appealing to users or not. For example, if someone searches on a mobile device and you have no mobile layout on your site, you may be missing out.

Myth 9: You need to modernize Your Home Page All the Time

Some people think that by updating their home page content all the time they will rank higher, or by not updating it their ranking will drop. In most cases that are not the case, since if you have a sales page that offers a product, then there would be no motive to update that page unless something about the product changes and Google expects that.

Myth 10: The H1 Header has Greater Value than the Rest of Your Text

The arrangement of your page is seen by Google and other engines, but you have to realize that many sites are structured in a different way. As such, no one specific tag has more worth than another. An H1 tag is simply a header that corresponds to a CSS entry in order for the user to see your page a positive way. It does not make Google rank your page any differently if you use H2 tags in its place, or if your keywords are frequently in the text and not in an exact CSS tag.

Myth 11: Linking to Other Highly Ranked Sites Helps Your Ranking

Some sites try to link to a lot of other high authority sites in order to help their rankings, but that does not help at all. Google uses PageRank to make a decision how your site will rank, and that algorithm is based on how useful your site is to others, and as such it will only look at how many other people link to you. Whether you link back to them is of no significance. Otherwise, any site could rise to the top simply by linking to millions of sites, which is simply not the case.

Myth 12: Using Automated SEO Methods is constantly Spam

Many people use automated SEO methods that do not fall into the spam area. Many companies have very big sites and they use automated scripts to do a lot of the grunt work of SEO. Whether or not a method is spammy is based on what the result is, not on how automated it is.

Myth 13: PageRank is the Only Factor that Matters

The algorithm that Google uses to rank sites is PageRank, which determines how valuable a site is to others. But according to Google, search result rankings are also affected by hundreds of other inputs. Some of these inputs are easy to see, like having your site being recommended by others on Google Plus. This proves that not just PageRank matters. The company is staying tight-lipped on how many inputs there are and how significant each is, but it is clear that there is more going on than just PageRank. With that said however, it is still generally believed that PageRank is the most vital factor, and a PR10 page is always better than a PR3 page.

Myth 14: The Title Tag is hidden from Search Engines

Most of what Google sees on your site is the text that is noticeable to users, such as what appears on the screen and is rendered in a web browser. As such, it would be simple to think that the title is not picked up. However, your title is very significant for SEO, because it is the text that appears on the link people will click on. Not only is Google using it to help your ranking, but people will also see it when they go to click on your site.

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