Search engine optimization has so many misconceptions and yet is so critical to the success of a business website. So what works and what doesn’t? What practices should you stay away from?

Myths

1. You have to submit your website URL to the search engines. This is no longer true. Spiders crawl through links as long as you have people linking to your site.
2. Your site must have a Google site map to rank well. This is not true. Most sites can be spidered the way they are.
3. A web page needs to have a minimum of 250 words to be indexed. There is no minimum requirement. Text content is important, but you should focus on writing good SEO text that tells a compelling marketing story.
4. You need to update your site often to rank well. Frequent updates will increase your crawl rate, but not your rankings. Some of the highest ranking websites haven’t been updated for years.

Mistakes

1. Don’t use the same META tags on every page. They should match the content on the page. The <title> tag is the most important for SEO. The first 65 characters are the most important.
2. Don’t ignore using the description tag <meta name=”description”>. It may be ignored by most search engines, but it may be used as the description of your site in the Google results.
3. Don’t produce your whole website in Flash. Flash will either be non-indexable or indexed poorly. Instead embed flash elements in HTML pages along with text that can be easily indexed.
4. Avoid using intro pages. Flash or graphic intro pages waste the most valuable SEO page on your website. Unless you want to be found for the keyword “skip intro”?

Mayhem

1. Beware of SEO firms that promise a #1 ranking. How can they claim this? They can’t control the search engines. You have to wonder what keywords they might be willing to do this for.
2. Beware of SEO firms that have secret methods that they won’t disclose. This is a warning sign that they are using black hat SEO methods. Remember, you are responsible for your website and your reputation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 6:07 am and is filed under SEO Strategies. 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.