Traffic Building

SEO Myth : Search engine rankings for your site can be guaranteed

You’ve probably seen the offers - “Rank first in Google or your money back! Guaranteed!”

Ever wonder what the catch is?

First, no rank in any search engine’s organic results can be guaranteed. Especially when it comes to competitive industries, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars, several months of work, and possibly some risky tactics to even make the front page for competitive searches.

If you’ll look at the fine print of these “guaranteed rankings” offers, you’ll typically find that they will:

1. Get you the top AdWords ad for a search term.
Quick and easy, just pay enough money to Google and they’ll rank your ad first tomorrow. This might do you some good, but you certainly don’t need any search engine marketing expertise to log into an AdWords account and give Google some money.

2. Rank your site first for an obscure search term.
Assuming Google is already indexing your site, getting a page ranked for a non-competitive search term should be fairly easy. The fact that ranking first for this term will do your site absolutely no good is rarely mentioned.

3. Any of a number of other word games that will result in a page on your site technically ranking “first” for some search term that will do your site or your business little good.

There are no short-cuts and no guaranteed rankings. Be wary of anyone who tries to tell you that there are.

SEO Myth : Your home page should be the most highly ranked page on your site.

Your home page is a throw away page when it comes to search engine optimization. Its purpose is to get your business message across and to provide quick and easy links to the important content on the other pages of your site.

It should act as a guide to tell a search engine what’s important about your site through the structure and text of the links there, not as a entry point for searches related to your business.

Think of your web site as a pyramid with your home page on top and the various pages that make up the rest of your site as the base of the pyramid. Just like the pyramid, the strength of your site comes from the base - from the content that represents the bulk of your site. And, just like a pyramid, many more people will reach the top after a climb from the base than will drop from the sky onto the tip.

Optimize your base to rank for important keywords then direct that traffic to your home page where your visitors will get your business message and see links to the most important areas of your web site.

SEO Myth : A certain keyword density is key to search engine rankings.

In the days when search engines were young and the calculations they used to categorize web pages were primitive, keyword density was an important factor in ranking well for a particular search term. The idea being that the more often a certain keyword (or version of a keyword) appeared on a web page, the more relevant that web page was for that term.

Once this predilection became known, webmasters started to stuff their web pages with multiple versions of the keyword they were trying to rank for in an effort to artificially inflate the value of the page in a search engine’s results.

As with any “quick and easy” path to good rankings, the efficacy of this keyword stuffing approach quickly diminished as more webmasters began using it and aggravating search engines with their attempts to manipulate search results.

So, if including a keyword once doesn’t get your page ranked and including it a hundred times may trigger a penalty from a search engine, what is a natural occurance? Five times? Ten times?

Enter “ideal keyword density”.

For the past few years, the generally accepted value was around 8% of your content. In other words, if you have 100 words in your web page content (the actual text of your site), 8 of those words should be versions of the keyword you’re trying to rank for. Granted, this was simply an educated guess from observation of which pages were ranking well for certain keywords but it was accepted enough across the industry to at least be close to truth.

So why is keyword density now a myth?

Without getting into how a search engine figures out what a web page is about or the other factors that influence page rank, suffice to say that it’s entirely possible that a page can be absolute gibberish to a human reader and still get credit for having a certain keyword density while having no relevance for that keyword at all.

Keyword density is still too easy to manipulate and search engines tend to avoid giving weight to any factors that are easy to manipulate.

The front runner for phasing out keyword density is concept density via latent semantic indexing but that’s a topic for another blog post.

Just realize that optimizing your pages for some magic keyword density at the expense of naturally written content is quickly losing any positive affect it may have had for helping your pages rank well.

SEO Myth : The keyword meta tag is important to your search engine rankings.

“Metadata” is data about data. Information that describes the structure, format, size, methods of access, target audience, etc. of information - in our case, web pages.

In the early internet, metadata in the form of “meta tags” was designed to provide a quick and easy way for a page author to tell search engines what the web page was about and who made up the target audience.

The utility of meta tags quickly ebbed as the web became more commercial and site authors realized that by stuffing their meta tags - especially the keyword meta tag - with repetitions of popular keywords they could increase their search engine rankings for those keywords and drive more traffic to their sites.

In the mid-nineties, the popular search engines of the day officially stopped supporting the keyword meta tag - both in response to keyword stuffing and because technology had advanced to the point where other methods of finding out what a web page is about (like indexing the entire content of the page) were both feasible and more effective.

Since then, search engine rankings have increasingly given more and more weight to off-the-page factors like the number and types of sites that link to web pages and less weight to simple metrics like meta tags.

From the perspective of the search engines, whose revenue model revolves around providing the most accurate and relevant search results possible, minimizing the importance of easily manipulated information like meta tags was simply good business.

In fact, many believe the kind of information you include in the keyword meta tag can actually hurt your page rankings as stuffing this tag is a typical first step for newbie search engine optimizers trying to naively manipulate the natural rankings of their pages.

This belief is strong enough that many site authors are leaving the meta keyword tag out of their site altogether.

I still think it’s a good idea to use a keyword meta tag, but would recommend including only the most relevant keyword phrase for the content of your page in the tag.

This is especially important for those of you maintaining legacy html that was created when keyword tag stuffing was en vogue - could that long list of barely relevant keyword phrases in your meta keywords tag actually be hurting the rankings of your pages?