Following on from my Top 5 SEO Secrets entry I made before, I thought it would be fun to complement that with a list of the most common search engine optimisation technique myths and lies that are often bounded around when people talk about SEO, so here we go:
- “Show one thing to humans, another to Google” Using some server-side trickery to check the User-Agent, some people will send the Google spider a completely different and optimised page to what a user will see. The search engines hate this and use incognito spiders to detect it.
- “The most important thing is to get on the front page of Digg/Reddit” Actually, the most important thing is getting relevant links and thus more relevant traffic, not just a random one off blip of traffic that never comes back. If you get onto the front page, make sure there is a reason for people to keep coming back.
- “Submitting your site to 10,000 directories will improve your ranking” How many of these directories have you ever heard of? How many do you, or anyone you know, actually use? I’m guessing the number is less than 1 for 99% of people. Many of the directories are of absolute minimal value … and search engines know this.
- “The more times a keyword appears on your page, the better!” Google et al place a huge amount on emphasis on the semantics of your page, not just the sheer numbers of words on your page. Put in too many keywords or repeat yourself too much (e.g. in meta tags, repeated 1000 times at the bottom of the page etc) and you’ll get keyword stuffing penalties.
- “Using PHP instead of ASP means you get better rankings because PHP is open source.” The search engines simply dont care what language you chose for the server side. They shouldn’t even be able to tell what language you are using if its done right - remember that the spiders only see what the user sees - i.e. the HTML web page. What was used to generate that HTML is not important.
The best thing to remember is SEO cannot guarantee you results, and you dont need to pay someone to do it for you. Effective SEO requires a symphony of techniques and - as you’d expect for a symphony - requires a considerable amount of effort, not least of which is adding quality, original content.