10 Urban legends of the SEO world

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SEO has only really begun to gain real popularity in the past 15 years so it’s still fairly new. It stands to reason that best practice and industry guidelines are going to change on a regular basis. If you come across an SEO who can’t keep up with these changes it’s time to ditch them and find one that can. Here are some of the outdated practices that some SEO’s still swear by.

1. PageRank sucks/is amazing

There are always going to be SEO’s who are going to swear blind that PageRank is completely irrelevant and has no influence on their SEO at all. These are also the same SEO’s that tend to put PageRank in their top five factors when sourcing links, they want links from pages with plenty of Yahoo backlinks, not too many links pointing out of that page, ideally it needs to have a good MozRank and they’ll look at the page rank. The PageRank might not be the be all and end all of SEO but it’s certainly something that needs to be kept in the mix and used with other factors.

2. Stuff the keyword tag

Everyone knows (ok, most SEO’s agree) that the keyword meta tag is dead and buried but that doesn’t stop some people trying to stuff their keyword tag full of every keyword they’d like their site to rank for. This isn’t doing any harm and it’s not like it takes hours to add this tag but there are too many people out there who pay good money for SEO when they don’t understand it and SEO’s insisting this method still improves rankings are taking advantage.

3. Submit your URL’s to hundreds of search engines

We all get those emails on a regular basis of promises to submit your site to hundreds of search engines for a nominal fee. Have you used something other than Google, Bing or Yahoo at all in the last month? Do your Analytics show traffic coming from a search engine other than these three? So long as you’re in the main three search engines you don’t have anything to worry about it. You may have been able to use this method to scam some links eight years ago but not anymore.

4. Buying links will kill your site

To be fair this one has some grounding in reality with stories about sites getting banished from Google indefinitely and on the whole buying links is considered black SEO practice but you have to be quite strict in what you’re defining as a paid link. Technically hiring an SEO agency to build links for you could be considered buying links but if you’re paying for advertising and you’re paying for the traffic that link could bring rather than the actual value of the link and it’s within context then a certain degree of common sense and technical SEO ability has to be used.

5. Keyword stuff your content

We’re always being told the importance of content, Google like fresh regularly updated content because it’s great for user experience. SEO’s like it because it can help with rankings when it’s done correctly. There are guidelines as to what keyword density you should be using but at the end of the day it needs to read naturally and you should always be writing your copy for the sake of your site traffic and not for the benefit of the search engines. Keyword variation is the in thing at the moment so instead of mentioning the same keywords in every other sentence add some alternative variations to help improve your long tail traffic and cut out spammy sounding copy.

6. Keyword linking

If your SEO only link builds using the same set of exact keywords it’s time to find a new SEO, like the keyword stuffed content, links have to look natural too. If Google suddenly sees loads of links starting to point at the same page with the exact same keyword it’s not going to look natural. Although you don’t want ‘click here’ under all your links you do need to vary them slightly to make them look more organic, you’ll also find this will help the number of referring organic keywords you’re ranking for as well. (5 daily checks useful for SEO)

7. No follow links are worthless

Ideally when link building you want as many as possible to be do follow but this doesn’t mean you should immediately discourage any link that has a no follow tag on it. Although there are some that would argue some link juice is still passes through, whether it helps rankings or not they can still have value. They can still pass traffic which is the ultimate goal of getting top ranking positions and you never know, some of that traffic might like your content enough to link from it independently themselves.

8. Paid advertising will impact organic positions

No matter how cynical you are there is no real hard evidence that spending money with Google’s PPC programme will benefit your organic positions. Google have said time and time again that you can’t buy your way into the organic listings and lets be honest, if it was ever proven you could buy your way into Google’s organic listings their credibility would be shot to shreds and we’d all be worshiping at the house of Bing. At the end of the day if a business is dominating the paid results it stands to reason they’ve got the budget to invest in Good SEO too.

9. Google hates SEO’s

Google hates bad SEO’s and SEO’s that try to find ways round their algorithm rather than working to their guidelines. Google gets some of it’s best feedback from SEO’s as SEO’s understand both how the search engines work and what Google is trying to achieve. Google spends a lot of time and money setting out their guidelines and best practice on how to rank and let’s be honest if all rankings were left entirely up to Google and there was no SEO intervention at all, not even half the results Google returned would be relevant to the original search query.

10. Spam

This last one has quite an ambiguous title, by spam in this instance I mean all those emails you get in very poor English (sorry to stereotype) that claim they can either fix your site, guarantee number one positions, get you thousands of back links or just generally rewrite the Google algorithm for you. General rule of thumb: if it looks to good to be true it probably is. A good SEO doesn’t need to rely on dodgy emails and they should be able to string a coherent sentence together. (Is your site onpage seo friendly (YET)?)

About Guest Author:
Jessica works for Schofields who provide French Insurance for holiday homes and have managed to achieve top rankings with good old fashioned SEO.

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