Mitash SEO, e-Commerce, Shopping Cart, Web Design & Development Blog

SEO myths keep proliferating by the day, almost sounding surreal in their pretensions of the truth. While some have their origins in reality, for the most part these myths have spread because of the difficulty involved in verifying whether a specific SEO practice resulted in a search engine reaction. New SEO’s have a field day propagating myths resulting from the confusion between cause and effect. Sadly, the imprudent usage of these myths by many businesses has resulted in their websites being banned by several search engines.

Out of the several scores of myths that make their way into accepted SEO practices, I will focus the most popular top 5 myths.

Guaranteed! Top Search Engine Rankings

You better be on your guard if someone’s guaranteeing you no.1 rankings on Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. Such SEO companies focus on creating vague and long keyword phrases that most users will never use to search for your company, but are easier to rank for. When instead they should work on delivering rankings on competitive keywords that are relevant to your business. No one, but the search engines can guarantee top results in organic search listings. Even Google, in its ‘help center’ mentions that ‘No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.’ You must always verify the SEO company’s results for other customers to ensure that you’re not being had for.

Meta Tag Mania

Meta tags were incorporated at the dawn of the internet to assist webmasters as well as to enable search engines figure out what a website was all about. Soon enough, its original intent was abused as people started incorporating useless keywords into their meta tags hoping to trick search engines into ranking them higher. Search engines soon got the wind of this and now place less importance on the presence or absence of meta tags and don’t spider or index them anymore.

Multiple Domain Dominance

The most abused and dangerous SEO strategy is the folly of owning multiple domain names in the belief that it helps maintain high search engine rankings. If you own multiple domain names which point to the same site; search engines will penalize you, as according to them they are ‘mirrors’. It is advisable for you to build sites corresponding to each separate domain name, if you have multiple domain names and desire high search engine rankings. However, if you own a large business, based on your company strategy, you could have a main website devoted to the overall company and used the balance domain names to focus on your various product or service offerings.  My take on domains is focus; concentrate all your efforts on improving SEO for one website rather than doing it for several.

Lowdown on Frequent Site Updates

Updating your site so that it has fresh content and will ensure that you rank high on search engines is a myth perpetrated by some SEO’s. While regularly updating your pages can increase the search engine crawl rate, it does not necessarily increase your search engine rankings. Statistics are testimony to several high ranking sites on Google that were not updated for a long time. Thus, what serves to increase your website rankings are the inbound links to it. However, if you have quality content, feel free to update your website – it will encourage search engine bots to crawl it regularly.

PPC versus organic SEO

There is a lot of confusion on whether PPC improves your search engine rankings much better that organic SEO. The fact is that while PPC can rank your website high on search engines in the short-term, in the long run, if your organic SEO ranking is good, users will definitely visit your website. Besides, most users trust organic listings as compared to sponsored website listings.

My advice, test any SEO technique several times over on various websites to see if it really works or whether it’s still another myth that is effective because of a host of other factors.

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