By Andy MacDonald

Ever wonder what the biggest SEO myths are? I have taken the most prevalent myths that seem to be constantly resurfacing and examined them for you. This is a must read for anyone looking to hire an SEO firm or someone looking to do SEO for themselves.

Myth # 1: All Meta Tags Are Of Equal Importance

Some Meta tags are useful while others are not. I have stated this many times. Search engines are relying more and more about what is on the website than what the tags are telling them. The description tag is used by some (but not all) search engines. The same goes for the keyword tag. Keyword tags are used more by spammers and people using software to find you as a link partner than the search engines. In my opinion, the only tags you should concentrate your efforts on are the robot tag and the description tags.

Note from the Blog Manager. I beg to differ on Myth #1. Smaller metasearch engines still might use the keywords. It can’t hurt to do them properly. MOST search engines including the big 3 ALL use the description tag. It’s the text that appears below your search result. Only DMOZ might change it on you and a search engine that gets the listing from DMOZ might use their description over yours.

Myth # 2: You Should Submit Your Site to Search Engines Weekly or Monthly

Honestly, I nevër submit any site more than 1 time and sometimes I don’t even do that. If you submit your site once, you’re good. The engines will come back on their own. You can sometimes speed up the process of getting your site indexed by linking it to a high traffïc or high PR site. The search engines will find the URL to your site and index it automatically.

Another annoying note from the Blog Manager: You can’t get your site listed faster by linking to someone else’s website, only by them linking to you. I’m not saying they won’t find it as a backlink, but getting a link on a high PR website that leads to you is the way to get crawled faster. Inbound links, not outbound links.

Myth # 3: SEO is Too Expensive

Actually, SEO is probably the most cost effective förm of online marketing. Organic SEO is cheaper to set up and maintain than a PPC campaign or banner advertising. With PPC and banner advertising, you pay for clicks or impressions. With SEO, all clicks are Frëe. You simply pay for the set up and monitoring of your site’s pages.

Myth # 4: PPC Is More Effective Than Natural SEO

In the short term…true. In the long term…false. Why, you ask? Organic SEO is preferred by searchers over 5 to 1 to PPC. People trust organic searches to return relevant results. People also know that the ads to the right of the page are sponsored ads. They have long ago figured out that anyone can bid on any term they want, as many often do, without even a hint of relevance. So, long term SEO structuring can indeed be more effective than PPC, especially when considering the preferences of search traffïc. A top 5 ranking may take some time to get, but once you are there (and provided you can maintain it), you will get better results than from a PPC ad.

Myth # 5: Hiring an SEO Specialist “In House” is Cheaper

The problem with hiring someone in house is that they are paid hourly or by salary. Most SEO firms charge per item or project. It doesn’t matter how long it takes us, you pay a one tíme charge. When you hire a firm, it’s like having a team of SEO experts on your payroll. Paying a flat rate saves you monëy and speeds up the time it takes to complete a job. Additionally, most SEO firms have specialists who write, submit, redesign sites, post pages, etc… Hiring one person who can do all these things competently is highly unlikely.

Myth # 6: I Can Only Optimize My Homepage for Key Terms

You can and should optimize every page on your site. Each page should have its own key terms, with no more than three phrases per page (preferably one).

Myth # 7: All I Need to do is Write Content with the correct Keyword Density and My Site Will Rank Well

Wrong…especially if you want to rank on Google. You will need off-site SEO as well as on-site SEO. Keyword density may work on MSN (for now), but it will take more than that to rank well for all search engines.

Okay, the Blog Manager is back again with another note: Content is still king. Offsite link schemes will never ever beat good content. If you offer something at your website that people will naturally link to because of the quality, then this is more cost effective AND since it is organic, ALL the search engines love it. Original content works. Offering free downloads, compelling articles, funny pictures, ecards people can send, blogs, and forums are all examples of stuff people link to.

Myth # 8: I Shouldn’t Aim for the Most Competitive Keywords and Phrases

If the keywords you are competing for are very competitive, should you optimize your site for them? Of Course! I would optimize for some high, medium and low competitive key terms. Cover all your bases. The worst case is that you won’t rank well for the high competitive key terms and that’s ok. You can always work to improve them. Don’t shy away from top key terms just because they are competitive. You may nevër know how close you could rank for them unless you try.

Myth # 9: Only Work With Companies That Give You A Guarantee

Guarantees would be nice if they were worth the paper they are printed on. In fact, most guarantees from SEO firms have the same stipulation in them. This stipulation usually states that as long as they get one of your key phrases to the top of any major search engines, they have fulfilled their end of the agreement. This is irrelevant to the competition of the term. In other words…it’s easy to be number one for terms no one is competing for. Don’t be deceived by high rankings listed on SEO sites as they can be misleading.

Uhh, yup, its me again. ASM Development doesn’t give pie in the sky guarantees but can help you get your site listed high in the search engines. The author is correct. Watch out for unbelievable guarantees. If it sounds too good to be true, well it is too good to be true.

Myth # 10: SEO Requires a 1 Year Commitment on My Part

It certainly shouldn’t. Don’t lock yourself into a year contract with any company unless you already have an established, favourable business relationship. SEO, in most cases, should be performed on a month to month basis with a mutual understanding of the objectives and relative timetable. Often, both the long and short term maintenance contracts that many firms insist on including with each job are unnecessary. As an example…If you have a new site optimized, especially right after an update, you may not see results for three months. Why pay for maintenance in the interim time?

Blog Manager again; I am always amazed at authors from time to time. If they don’t charge a maintenance fee, they say you should never pay anyone a maintenance fee. They meanwhile likely make it up by charging a much higher up-front fee. If they don’t do one-year contracts, they say you should never do one-year contracts. In other words, they are saying only sign with me. I do everything the right way and everyone else does iot the wrong way. If a company offers me a one-year contract and as a result I get a different level of service or can save money, then I take the one-year contract.

Also, it doesn’t always take 3 months to see the results of SEO all the time. SEO is ongoing. With ASM Development, we have seen link popularity grow for a website by 400 links in less than one week. Should we stop and wait 3 months to see if that will have a positive affect on our SEO efforts? Or should we continue to work as hard as we can for our clients so we can improve even more?

Additionally, you may not be happy with the results of an SEO firm or even the level of service. A long term contract may only ensure that you receive a full year of bad service. So, don’t lock yourself in with a year contract, at least until you are comfortable with whom you are dealing with.

Hopefully, I put a few common SEO myths to rest. Feel frëe to contact me with questíons you may have regarding these or other SEO myths you want more information on.

And hopefully I helped to put to rest some of the misconceptions the article leads to. SEO Experts often disagree. I agree with most of what the author had to say here with only a couple of points I disagree on. I especially like the way they slipped in that myth #10. “Everything our company doesn’t do is the wrong way to do things.”

In other words, I can start a company tomorrow that instead of charging you money for my SEO work, I want you to pay me in jelly beans. Then when I write an article like this I can say, “You should never pay for SEO with cash. You should only pay in jelly beans.” Then since I’m of course the only one accepting jelly beans I must be the top guy to hire.

ASM Development can help you with all your SEO & Web Design needs

About The Author
Andy MacDonald owns and runs his own custom website design company called Swift Media UK which also incorporates ecommerce development, affordable web hostíng, and logo design.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 3:48 am and is filed under MAIN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.