5 SEO Myths

With the increasing popularity of SEO, there are more and more so called “seo experts” popping up in every corner of the web world and while the sources of proper SEO knowledge has substantially increased over the last few years, confusion still exists and the misinformation spread by these half baked just adds more to it.

Here are some SEO Myths that are most commonly found among clients as well as newbies..

a) SEO is a Sham – This is mostly prevalent among clients who have burnt their fingers once or twice with so called SEO companies. One of the key reasons for this is that these companies would often not tell you what exactly they are doing to SEO your website and would often explain the stuff they do with terms like “proprietory technique” etc and finally end up with no results. This myth has been substantially busted this days because more and more good seo companies are coming into the picture who would properly educate the client and provide absolute transparency. Also articles on SEO and search engine marketing published on leading magazines like Business Week, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes have contributed to establishing the credibility of SEO.

b)It is better to go with a SEO company that guarantees ranking – It has been said time and again by authority SEO websites and even by search engines like Google to avoid SEO companies and consultants that guarantees ranking. Here you can check what Google says.
These guarantees generally work based on one or more of the following ..

• These SEO companies would not care about a long term success but show you some short term boost in rankings and get the money out.
• In most cases they would give you a large collection of keywords and the payment terms would be based on getting ranking for atleast few of them ( 5 keywords out of 20 should have first page ranking etc ) and in most cases they would have really long tail un competitive keywords included to cover these “5 keywords”. You wont get any traffic but they get their money by fulfilling the condition.
• Some contracts require on going payment for continued ranking thereby reducing your marketing ROI. Whereas a good SEO campaign done for a proper period of time can go with minimum maintenance.
• Also, most of those SEO companies would have some fine prints in the guarantee which if you read in details you are sure to sense the bad ethics of these companies.

If you want to find a good SEO company or SEO consultant try to evaluate them by their experience, portfolio and get references for their previous clients rather than going by a guarantee. Here’s an article on how to choose a SEO consultant.

c) You should Submit URLs to Search Engines – Yes, there are SEO companies that charge their client mentioning that they would submit the client’s website URL to a few thousand websites every week.This is absolutely NOT required. The modern search engines can easily find and index your website by following the inoming links and there is no need to submit them to the search engines. Also, other than the few major search engines, the other engines that are there would hardly ever drive any traffic to your site so it doesn’t make any sense submitting to those engines either.

d) Flash is bad – No, Flash is not bad however lack of text and complete reliance on flash is bad. Also, Google has announced about its flash indexing capabilities recently which is definitely a good news.

e) Meta Keywords tag is Important – Again a complete myth. Google has depreciated the Meta keywords tags and Yahoo might be using it for non-compeitive misspellings and similar variation of keywords but definitely not for regular keywords. It would not harm to have a Meta keywords tag on your web page but it would not help you tobbost your search rankings on proper keywords.