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Myth-busting Search Engine Optimization Rumors
- By Ruth800 Ruth800
- Published 02/6/2010
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Unrated
Ruth800 Ruth800
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Many companies that claim they are experts in search engine optimization insist on outdated concepts and rumors that look good in paper, but are really just myths. Like myths in the real world, these contain more fiction than fact. Let's dissect two of the more common myths in the search engine optimization world, and try to learn from them.
Myth: Search engines give a lot of weight in the meta-tag keyword headers of your site; therefore you should optimize these over anything else.
Fact: Many scrupulous search engine optimization companies will sometimes ask for a premium optimizing your meta-tag keywords, telling you that there is a certain algorithm used and that they are the only ones who know of this special technique. While that may be true for around 2005, that certainly isn't true today.
Back in the early days of search engines, the only way a search engine can gauge the relevance of a page is by parsing the text on the page. Sometimes the page might contain unparsable content, or may be part of a series of pages talking about a certain topic in general but does not mention that topic in the page itself. Therefore the search engines some sort of "hint" as to what the page is about. Thus the keyword meta-tag is born.
Of course, search engines have already evolved and use other means of gauging page relevance such as off the page factors (links from other sites, search result hit rate, etc.) Moreover, some webmasters had the idea of stuffing the meta-tag with irrelevant keywords designed to get a good rank on search results that have nothing to do with their pages. Because meta-tags are easily (and have been) abused, search engines like
Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages.'); return false">Google have disregarded these meta-tags.Myth: Search engines give a lot of weight in the meta-tag keyword headers of your site; therefore you should optimize these over anything else.
Fact: Many scrupulous search engine optimization companies will sometimes ask for a premium optimizing your meta-tag keywords, telling you that there is a certain algorithm used and that they are the only ones who know of this special technique. While that may be true for around 2005, that certainly isn't true today.
Back in the early days of search engines, the only way a search engine can gauge the relevance of a page is by parsing the text on the page. Sometimes the page might contain unparsable content, or may be part of a series of pages talking about a certain topic in general but does not mention that topic in the page itself. Therefore the search engines some sort of "hint" as to what the page is about. Thus the keyword meta-tag is born.
Of course, search engines have already evolved and use other means of gauging page relevance such as off the page factors (links from other sites, search result hit rate, etc.) Moreover, some webmasters had the idea of stuffing the meta-tag with irrelevant keywords designed to get a good rank on search results that have nothing to do with their pages. Because meta-tags are easily (and have been) abused, search engines like
Note that the description meta-tag is used by some search engines to display a small snippet of text that will be shown alongside your page title and provide a short description of the landing page. Unfortunately (or fortunately), this keyword does not affect search engine ranks either.
Myth: If you submit your site to the search engines many times, your site will get ranked faster - or - submitting to many search engines will get your site indexed with all of them
Fact: There are many search engine optimization companies that make a living out of submitting your site to hundreds of search engines to guarantee your search ranks, or that they will submit your sites everyday to these engines so that your site will get crawled faster. Unfortunately, this is just a myth.
Simply put, submitting your site to a search engine merely gives the search engine a hint that your site exists. It is not a trigger or a command to the search engine to start crawling and indexing your page. Many of the major search engines have a schedule for crawling sites - if your site happens to have updated at the middle of the crawling period, you may need to wait until the next crawling to see the updates.
Moreover, the statement that claims your site will be submitted to "hundreds" of search engines is stretching the truth. Although there may be hundreds of search engines out there, the fact is that only a handful of search engines have any relevance and real users. If you're checking out an SEO company that claims they do these services, ask them to provide you a list of these search engines and decide for yourself if it's worth paying their services to have them submit your sites. Chances are it is not.