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It’s Time To Kill These 10 SEO Myths

Many of us love a good zombie movie. Hollywood has been making them forever. And unfortunately there are a number of SEO myths that seem to live on like zombies—they just won’t die. However, you don’t need to be a victim of these myths. Today is the perfect day to put these 10 SEO myths in their graves and bury them once and for all. Let’s each grab a shovel and start piling on the dirt.

Myth 10
Get an outside service to submit your site to search engines. We’ve all seen the ads and received the emails. The truth is that no one needs a service to submit their site to the search engines. First, eventually the search engines will find your site if you build backlinks to it. Second, if you want to speed up the process, every search engine has a page where URLs can be submitted.

Myth 9
Constant website updates are essential to high search results placement. It’s a fact that there are plenty of static websites that do quite well within search results. If your site is relevant it will find its rightful position within search result rankings. This isn’t to say that keeping your site fresh is a bad thing; no, it’s a good thing. But, when you update make sure the additions and changes you make are relevant.

Myth 8
If you really want to boost your rankings, submit an XML site map to Google. Google likes XML site maps, but submitting a site map to Goggle doesn’t bump you up with search results. The map is used to make sure it has found all the pages of the site.

Myth 7
For the best SEO, use a hyphenated domain name. I’m talking about domain names like: Just-Really-Funny-Cat-Videos.com. The hyphens in the domain name don’t do much for SEO. Overuse of hyphens and keywords do ruin your credibility and brand, though. Who wants to buy from my-super-awesome-green-funny-play-toys-online-store.com?

Myth 6
Hookup with a contractor to mass build links to your site. Everyone knows that search engines evaluate back links to your site when it weighs popularity within search results. The important word in the previous sentence is “evaluate.” Low-value links from sites that have been identified as spammers won’t enhance your SEO. In fact, they might do just the opposite.

Myth 5
Stay away from Flash, it ruins your SEO. Like any cool toy, Flash has become extremely popular. Flash animations by themselves do not hurt your SEO, as long as you have adequate HTML content and navigation that has been optimized. A Flash website, with no HTML, though, would be a problem.

Myth 4
Pepper your pages with hidden links for better SEO. Website authors have been known to hide page links in tiny fonts set to the background color with the hopes of improving the search engine visibility for pages deep within their sites. Google and its little cousins are smarter than this.

Myth 3
Don’t worry about creating links to all your pages. Eventually search engines might find these “orphan” pages, but you can’t count on it, and even then they may only appear in the most esoteric or specific keyword searches. Just do it – provide links to all your pages.

Myth 2
SEO your site once and forget about it. Your website, your competitors, and Google search algorithms are all changing and growing constantly. You need to continue your SEO strategies to stay on top of the rankings.

Myth 1
Optimize your meta tags for better rankings. He who speaks of floppy disks will tell you of the day when HTML programmers loaded up webpages with enough meta tag keywords to cover a medium sized continent. As with the warm tortilla chips at Chevys, the idea was that “the more the better.” Search engine algorithms have been updated many times since then and this tactic no longer works.

Chris Turberville-Tully is the owner of Inspiration Inc., a SEO Birmingham agency. With a Masters Degree in Information Architecture, 10 years public relations experience, and years of search experience, Chris creates client strategies to deliver real value.