Online marketing is a strange profession sometimes. Because the definitive answers to success on Google, MSN and Yahoo! are fiercely guarded to prevent breaking the system, we online marketers are left playing a guessing game through trial and error to find out what is beneficial and what is going to cause problems to your website’s optimisation. Suffice it to say that there is a hell of a lot of nonsense spouted on the subject – enough to write a book, let alone a newsletter piece like this.

Nonetheless, some of the lore spouted by SEO wannabes and then repeated by those who don’t know better is so ridiculous that it needs to be debunked. So here we are with a service to the general public – if you hear someone spouting any of these top 8 myths (top 10s are too predictable!), feel free to smile gently and then ignore them!

Someone can guarantee you top rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN

This one is the hallmark of the shady “SEO” company that spams mailing lists looking for the gullible who think that getting to the top of Google can be done with a one-off payment and black magic.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s no quick way or guaranteed way to climb to the top of the rankings, no matter what these folks tell you. Often this is a trick in wording, and they’ll put you at the top of the paid listings, which anyone can do with the right budget, or worse they will get you to the top of the rankings… but for a phrase that nobody in their right mind would search for (like “penguin holidays in Egypt” or something ludicrous). If you hear this promise from an SEO company: Just. Say. No.

You need to submit to the search engines in order to be found

This is another one you often see listed in said spam emails – impressive sounding promises to submit your website to hundreds of major search engines. This is best ignored for two reasons:

Depending on your country, there’s between 1 and 4 major search engines worth bothering with – in the UK it’s Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, and all of these will find your sites anyway as soon as someone links to it. You have the option of submitting your site (even Google has a form for this) but it won’t give you some magical rankings lift – it’s a placebo, pure and simple.

And if you still want to be listed for those other ‘major search engines’, consider this: the majority of those are powered by the big four. It’s the very definition of an exercise in futility.

Note: Just to clear up any confusion, submitting to directories is still valuable, but submitting to hundreds is not. It’s all about carefully handpicking the ones relevant to you for the best results.

Link Exchanges are loved by search engines

If you’re a webmaster, the chances are you’ll have received an email from a stranger suggesting you link to each other because “search engines like Google will rank us higher.” Misleading and potentially harmful.

This isn’t so much a myth as outdated information. There was a time, between 3 and 10 years ago depending on the search engine, that reciprocal linking was a good way of improving your rankings. But the truth is that it was abused, and so many sites were doing it that the search engines realised that the ‘link as a vote of confidence’ wasn’t doing its job.

Nowadays the best kind is a one-way link from an authority site, and sadly it’s much harder than reciprocal linking for a very obvious reason: it’s harder to game and presents better results.

You need to link to as many people as possible

This was a new one to me, but I recently heard of it being passed off as fact. The truth is that this could well set off spam flags in the search engines, as well as not really benefiting your site, as the link juice you’ve managed to accumulate will seep away like your website were a leaky colander. Inbound links are the way to get credit in the search engines, linking to others is giving them more benefit than it’s giving you. For each site you link to, as yourself if it’s giving something worthwhile to your readers. If it’s not, scrap the link!

It’s all about balance – if you have significantly more outbound links than inbound, then you don’t look like a resource, and just seem a bit on the spammy side. Linking to other sites is important, but only if they offer use to your readership and are thematically related to the content of yours – otherwise you just look like a poorly defined link farm.

Metatags are all important

Again, this one is less a myth than an outdated truth. There are three standard metatags (technically titles aren’t, but they’re usually bundled in so I won’t buck convention): Title tags (the titles that appear in the top of your browser window and in the natural search engine listings), Meta Descriptions (an outline of what the page contains, sometimes used underneath titles in natural search listings) and Meta Keywords (a list of keywords invisible to humans that the search engines can use to categorise pages.) These actually are also listed in order of importance.

A good title still is important, not only to search engines, but to users who will see it first when they perform a search. Meta Descriptions are slightly less so, but Meta Keywords are next to useless – and have been for some time. It doesn’t hurt to put them in (and there’s a possibility that some obscure search engine that one person will use at some point may use this data) but it’s been redundant for the big engines for years. The reason?  They were abused – people were putting in any old words and appearing high in the search engines for content not actually on their site.

Top Placement in the Search Engines is the Ultimate Goal in SEO

Sure, search engine rankings are important, and it’s true that you will get a lot more traffic if you appear in the top 10, but step back a minute. What’s the reason you became interested in search engines in the first place? It wasn’t to appear high in search engines – that’s just means to an end – the real reason was to increase traffic in order to increase sales and get larger profits.

The truth is that SEO is worthless if your website isn’t converting traffic to sales. And as the ultimate goal is to improve this then, in effect, it doesn’t matter if you’re number 1, 5 or 10,000 as long as your sales and your profits pick up. If you get slightly less sales but much higher profits from position 3 than you would in position 1 then that should be the goal.

Automated software is just as effective as an SEO company

I’d love it if there was automated software to do my job for me – it’d give me a lot more free time, but the truth is this stuff just doesn’t work. And if it does give you a boost, it’s strictly temporary for you will probably sooner or later feel the wrath of the Google Gods for trying to game the system.

For example, Google looks for natural linking and organic growth patterns, and suddenly generating 1,000 links off poor quality pages just doesn’t seem natural. The truth is that the only way to get good rankings is to put the hours in.

You need X number of Keywords per page to rank number #1

Some SEO types struggle with the truth that our industry is no longer an exact science. This is true throughout the myths you see bandied about, but no more so than when it comes to discussing KEC (or Keyword Enriched Copy – basically where the keywords typed into Google, MSN and Yahoo are distributed throughout a text to make them more relevant to the search engines).

I’ve heard all kinds of certainties touted from “3 phrases per page” to “20 phrases per page”. The truth is that it’s most likely measured as a density (because 3 phrases on a page with 1 sentence of text looks ridiculous, but on an essay would hardly be enough), but even then we don’t know the percentage, so there’s no point in guessing.

The way we do our KEC here at LeadGenerators is to write it and then read it back to ourselves to make sure it sounds natural. If we’re hearing the phrase come up more often than would sound normal in typical speech, then it’s time to reduce that number, because that’s the kind of thing Google’s spam filter is on the look out for. As KEC is one of many factors search engines use for ranking pages, there’s no point risking getting caught for stuffing that last keyphrase into an already bloated text.

This is only scratching the surface of the truths and half truths I hear on a daily basis.

I would love to hear of more of these myths.  If any of you have come across some classics or some “fun” ones, please send them over to me.

The best thing to do if something sounds a little too good to be true is to ask the experts – if you have a question on SEO that you need an answer to, drop us a line at marketing@leadgenerators.co.uk – we may even include it in the newsletter to spread the right information.