SEO Myths and Mistakes

Sorting through the clutter

Guarantees of Top Placement
Beware of companies offering guarantees and top placement. The only guarantee in the search marketing industry is that it changes frequently. Many SEO firms with guarantees also have contracts with loads of small print. Others are simply middlemen selling paid position in pay per click engines.

Doorway Pages
A few years ago it was quite popular to develop thousands of nearly identical pages for SEO. These pages changed just slightly to cover keyword variations or different search engine algorithms. It didn't take long for the search engines to wise up to these tactics and create filters to block doorway pages. The search engines' terms of service clearly identify the use of multiple pages, subdomains or domains with substantially duplicate content as spam.

Submitting and Resubmitting
Some marketers believe it is necessary to constantly submit your website to the search engines. There are numerous software programs available that claim to instantly submit your website to thousands of engines. Most major search engines have long ago taken down their handy "Add URL" pages. Instead, it carries more weight when your site is discovered through a link from a site already in their database. When another quality site links to yours, it is a point for your site's reputation or relevance.

All you need are Meta Tags
Most meta tags are simply ignored by the search engines. Today's search engines look at your page's title, content and links to determine what your site is about. A few search engines will display meta description content along with your listing.

Graphics and Flash Animation are "In"
If organic search engine listings are your goal, steer clear of web designers who build sites with ALL graphics or flash animations. Search engines do not presently index the content of graphics, java script enabled navigation or animations. Instead, they are looking at just the text portions of your web pages to decide what your web page is about.

Link Farms A tactic to artificially boost a site's link popularity. This practice involves groups of webmasters trading links. Search engine filters are now adapt at weeding out sites with artificial link structures. While in-bound links to your site are incredibly important to your search engine strategy, they are best recruited individually. Produce a site with great content and other sites will naturally link to you. Avoid aggressive link campaigns if you have a long-term strategy for your domain.