SEO Misconceptions

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a  concept that involves crafting a website and it’s listing in search engines in the best possible way to get ranked in the search engines as high as possible.  There are many theories and ideas that are wildly misunderstood about search engine optimization techniques.

We put together a list of the most misunderstood ideas about search engine optimization.

There are 10,000 search engines out there

It would be more accurate to say that there are thousands of search engines out there but only a handful of them are worth submitting your site to. After you get past the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and even a few others, there is really no point in continuing to submit your site to different search engines. First, viewership is very small. Secondly, most search engines use the search technology of other search engines.

PageRank is dead

While it is true that Pagerank doesn’t have nearly the significance it once did, it is still a great gauge on evaluating the richness of a website. Not just any website will be obtain a high Pagerank.

You should repeat your keywords 100 times on each page

Unless your webpage has 10,000 words in it, you don’t want to have such high number of repetition for a keyword. This is considered keyword stuffing. You don’t want to do it. Generally you want to limit your targeted keywords to repeat anywhere from 2-10 times on the same webpage.

Search engines don’t have time to ban you for bad SEO

On the contrary…search engines make it a high priority to make sure that the websites they index are relevant and accurately match the searches people conduct.

You should continually submit your site to every search engine

False. You really only need to submit your site to search engines once and only to the top search engines. As discussed earlier, many search engines will use the search results of the bigger search engines.

You don’t need content to get ranked high

Search engines are getting better and better at spotting high quality websites. One of the criteria that search engines use to determine their search engine results pages, is how much content a website has and the quality of that content. Don’t be misled by any SEO techniques or companies that promise high rankings with little or no content.

Meta tags are not very important

This is probably one of the most misunderstood SEO considerations. Meta tags are special coding that tell search engines specific things. Having meta tags are a great value to search engine listing.

All you need is more links

Having a ton of links to your website is definitely a major consideration for search engines. But they still have to be of good quality and relevant to your website content. Also, reciprocal links don’t carry as much as they used to.

SEO doesn’t require patience

False. Any good SEO technique will take time to craft. Also, SEO is all about the long term effects and sustaining in the search engines. Most of the time, short term gains are just that, short term…they don’t last.

New sites can’t get listed in search engines

False. Of course new sites can get listed. But this doesn’t mean that it will be listed #1. That does take time and it is difficult to do as the existing #1 ranked website will be working hard to make sure they stay #1.

At the end of the day, search engine optimization is about putting in effort, patience, and sticking to proven techniques. Trying to ‘trick’ or manipulate the search engine results listings will only get you banned from the search engine.