Knowledge is power…

Like most people when I go to buy a product or service I generally carry out some research into it first, so I know what I’m looking at…

I guess the same can be said for people looking for a SEO Consultant, however as SEO2.0 recently pointed out in his blog article (Check out his blog for the full article) there are certain myths surrounding SEO, and he’s created a great Top 10 SEO Myths, which everyone thinking of engaging a SEO consultant should read…

Top 10 SEO Myths V2

1. “Your top ten search engine ranking can be guaranteed.”
Some SEO firms will advertise a “guarantee” to have you listed in the top ten rankings. No one other than the search engines themselves can guarantee any ranking…

2. “My in-house webmaster/web designer/programmer can do the SEO cheaper.”
Most SEO professionals can get higher rankings faster because search engine optimization and Marketing is complex, technical and has a steep learning curve…

3. “Search engine traffic is worthless or not as good as other kinds of targeted traffic”
Search engine traffic is probably the most qualified traffic, because it comes from people searching for the exact products and services which the search engines have you indexed…

4. “Websites are optimized for search engines out of the box”
A minority of designers and developers actually optimize pages for the search engines while they are building them. Most search engine optimization is done afterwards, if at all. You can lower the cost of SEO substantially if you include SEO from the start, even before the design part.

5. “Simply inserting keywords in the keyword meta tag will help list your site for that keyword”
Most major search engines do not use the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor and those that do, if the keyword is not also in the copy of the same page, it’s considered a factor which could lower your rankings, not raise it…

6. “The more times you repeat the keyword in the page, the higher it will rank”
So called “keyword density” does not matter as a major ranking factor outside the requirement that the actual keyword is present on the page in the way of natural language…

7. “Hidden links or text in a page can get your page ranked higher”
Keyword stuffing and hidden links in the page can get your site penalized or banned if detected…

8. “You don’t need to update your site to keep your rankings”
By routine maintenance (removing outdated material, fixing broken links, queries, etc.) and updating your pages regularly, you are signaling the bots and crawlers to come back and re-crawl your site for changes to their listings…

9. “You can achieve higher rankings on a keyword without changing the code or content of the pages in your site”
After Google introduced the Google bombing filter getting a higher ranking solely based on links pointing to your site does not work anymore as already mentioned at 6). If you want to steadily improve your rankings, you must make changes to your site that help the search engines spider it…

10. “Google PageRank is the single most important ranking factor for your site in Google”
While PageRank was never the only factor in ranking sites, it was in the early days of Google the most important one…

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