Yesterday, Lee Odden wrote 5 myths about SEO, I thought I’d follow up with 5 more myths about SEO…
1. Instant Results
“Our company assures that you will get instant results with our SEO programâ€
If an SEO says that they can get you instant results, they are either purposely feeding you incorrect information, thinking you don’t know any better, or they themselves don’t know any better about results. Either way, stay away from this false promise. Optimizing your site takes time. You will see results after you start your SEO program, but you’re not going to miraculously be on the top of the SERPs (search engine results page) from the start.
2. Guaranteed Placement
“We guarantee top placementâ€
This has to be the worst lie ever told, yet so many people fall for it every day. If an SEO or company says the word “guaranteeâ€, then you should NOT hire them (or even waste time talking to them). Since an SEO is a third party and are not affiliated with the search engines, they can not make any guarantees.
3. 1000 Search Engine Submission
“We will submit your site to over a 1000 search enginesâ€
Since there are only four major search engines which feed 99% of the world’s searches, submitting to 1000 of them wouldn’t really do you any good. Also, these four search engines feed most of the smaller search engines. For example, Netscape and AOL use Google’s search results to feed their search engines. Another thing you should think about is the fact that submitting to a search engine doesn’t mean your site will get indexed by them, you are merely suggesting your site. And what’s the use of submitting a site that is not optimized?
4. Meta Tags
“Each page of our website is optimizedâ€
If each and every page of your website is already optimized, why aren’t you ranking in the first position for all your keywords? Changing your Meta tags isn’t just what it was a few years ago. Search engines now look at many more factors than just meta tags, such as keyword density, link popularity, relevance of your site to the actual keyword.
5. We Don’t Need SEO
“Our website 100% search compatibleâ€
Unless you get an email from Google congratulating you on your 100% search engine compatible site, it’s just isn’t true. Let’s face it…no site can be 100% search engine friendly. Search engine optimization is based on one’s perception of guidelines released by the search engines, most of which are theories, not facts. What works on one niche may not work for another.
There is no easy way out when it comes to SEO. It is all about testing theories, hard work and sometimes a bit of luck.
I think another popular myth to debunk is that one’s page must validate in order to rank or, if one’s page isn’t ranking well, it is because of validation errors.
Validation does NOT equal parsing. It is a search engines job to analyze pages as visitors to the sites would likely see them. Since pages can be totally borked and still display in a browser, can search engines be as unforgiving as some claim?
Better yet, take a look at the top results for almost any search string and look at how many even come close to validating.
It is however true that a page can be so totally messed up that important information can be overlooked but no where near to the extent as some would like one to think.
If in doubt, run pages through http://oy-oy.eu/page/spider/ to see what a search engine spider might be seeing. It of course is not an exact duplication of the processing of search engines but it is likely pretty close.