Well Known SEO Myths And Misconceptions

With Google making over 500 changes a year to their algorithm many people discover new potential discoveries on how the search engine operate and as a result many myths and misconceptions are branded as a way to improve on organic rankings within the the search engine results pages (SERPs). Added to the many SEO techniques and methods used to help improve organic listings within the SERP's it's easy to realize that many theories have been circulated around the internet with many unable to challenge or ague against such theories. As a result many will harm their SEO effects and ultimately cost themselves within the organic listings and it could be resolved by educating yourself with what's fact and what's simply a myth or misconception.

A well known industry leading SEO blog, Seomoz.org release each year it's own survey of 'Search Engine Ranking Factors'. Each year the survey helps distinguish myths and fills the SEO industry with new figures relish upon. It is through this that many current SEO's can stay up to date with current industry trends. But many fail to keep up to date and therefore old and out of date methods are carried on.

The current findings for the 2011 survey have helped discard many considered useful SEO tactics and strategies. To begin with the myth that using Google services will improve your rankings has been clearly proven to be just that, a myth. Using many of Google's services such as Webmaster Tools and Analytic s will help optimise your site and increase it's performance within the SERP's but there is no preference chosen or any impact on ranking just for using such services. A side note to this is that using Ad sense too much can actually negatively impact your rankings. This implies that more advertisements will mean less content and therefore less likely to offer quality content.

Secondly, keyword stuffing and density has changed a lot over the last few years and many still stick with the premise that there is a mathematical formula that divides the number of words on a page by the number of instances of a chosen keyword and this is used by the search engines for ranking and relevancy calculations. But unfortunately as common a belief this is for many SEO's it's in fact considered much better to use keywords intelligently. As it's the users that will be deciding on how useful and relevant the content is and if keyword density is over used then the information may become unreadable by the human eye and turn many visitors away.

Also, the meta keyword tag was an important aspect in the SEO process. This involved including the keywords you wanted your site to rank for but due to the tags being misused by spammers it quickly became redundant. With all major search engines no longer indexing or use the meta tag keyword descriptions for ranking. The other meta tags are considered important but the importance of the meta tags have greatly decreased in the last few years.

Lastly, the belief that 'Nofollowed' links are worthless is something that is changing. A discovery from the most recent Seomoz survey has noticed that there is a negative correlation between the percent of followed linking pages and ranking ability. Therefore the higher the percentage of 'followed' links in your link profile the lower your are likely to rank. Therefore it is not recommended to have 100% of followed links and to include many 'Nofollowed' links. As a result will hopefully represent a more diverse link profile and and actionable metric that can be used to increase your seo.

Above is just a few commonly believed myths that are surrounding the area of SEO. Many realize that search engine optimisation is an ever changing industry with Google at the helm and nothing is certain stay the same for any length of period.