Working in the industry and reading industry related publications we often come across questions about SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. A recent copy of .net magazine published their “Top 5 SEO myths”:
- Search engine technology is moving too fast: I can’t keep up!
- Submitting my website to the search engines takes forever
- SEO is dangerous and can get my sites taken off the search engines
- Keywords and description META tags are the most important part of SEO
- I’ll see results from SEO Quickly
We often hear and read about these myths so I will offer my views below:
Search engine technology is moving too fast: I can’t keep up!
Search engines need to constantly evolve and improve to provide users with the content they need and to stay ahead of the competition. This isn’t something to fear but to embrace. If you are providing good, solid content that users want to read you can rest assured that the search engines want to find you.
Submitting my website to the search engines takes forever
If you have a brand new website it could take a while to appear if you wait for the site to be found by the crawlers but there are things you can do. You can tell the search engine companies whether it be Google, Bing or Yahoo about your site and they will simply crawl it at the next opportunity.
SEO is dangerous and can get my sites taken off the search engines
SEO is not dangerous and you will only be removed from the site should you try and trick the search engines. Make sure you stay away from these “Black Hat” techniques and you should be OK:
- Gateway pages – Creating optimised pages towards a specific search term and immediately directing a user away from that page on entry
- Keyword stuffing – Using keywords too much or that are not relevant to your site in order to trick the search engine
- Hidden content – Hiding content behind other elements that the user cannot see but the search engine bots can.
Keywords and description META tags are the most important part of SEO
This is perhaps the most common mis-conception. Some years ago this would have been true but due to better algorithms and the number of people trying to trick the search engines the keyword and description tags are now more or less defunct. Search engines will have a better idea about which search terms your site is relevant too by the content and not by you telling it.
I’ll see results from SEO quickly
Due to the sheer size and number of sites on the web getting noticed will take time. If done well however the time taken to achieve this will be well worth it.
With this in mind what does work?
Obviously there are too many aspects I could go into but here a few to think about:
- Realistic search terms – think who your customers are and what phrases they may use to find you. It is much more likely that someone using a concise search term will turn into a customer.
- Clear navigation and machine readable content – make sure your site is easy to navigate, can be read and is reflected in the sitemap
- Off-site links – Try and get links to your site on relevant, trusted websites.
Tags: bing, Black Hat, Google, search engines, SEO, Yahoo
