As promised, Here are my slides from fitbloggin. I’m glad everyone enjoyed the talk. I’m open for questions, and of course, if you are in need of any blog, seo, or technology consulting, I’ll be happy to help.
Watch http://simpleweight.com/blog for new updates to my Weight Management website.
myth: SEO is easy to learn.
src: 9 Web Site Optimization (SEO) Myths Debunked vs. myth: You need an Expert to help you succeed in SEO.
src: Free SEO Tutorial (Part 5) – Google, Article, Content, Myths myth: SEO is a hand off project. Let the consultants take care of it.
src: Top 10 SEO myths revealed Scott’s Take: The advanced topics of SEO may not be easy to learn. However, the majority (80%) of the websites are fine without the advanced topics. Consequently, I agree with you don’t need an expert. You can do it yourself. However, Just as you can paint your house yourself, sometimes, you just want an expert to do it for you.
myth: Click-through rate is a major part of search engine rankings. The engines have said publicly that CTR is a very noisy and un-useful signal, and not something they’d rely on.
src: What’s The Biggest SEO Myth? | Shark SEO
myth: The search engines penalize you if you do active/obvious SEO (they don’t). The engines themselves promote SEO best practices, and Google’s gone as far as to endorse and promote SEO events, a guide and an SEO toolset.
src: What’s The Biggest SEO Myth? | Shark SEO myth: SEO is dangerous and can get my site taken off the search engines.
src: Top 10 SEO myths revealed
myth: The biggest SEO myth is probably that of “quality content”.
src: What’s The Biggest SEO Myth? | Shark SEO myth: Instead of focusing on building a quality site with good, useful information, I should try to find some “trick” to make my site rank well.
src: SEO 101: Myths and Facts about Search Engine Optimization myth: SEO is about tricking search engines into ranking my site high.
src: Top 10 SEO myths revealed Scott’s take: The idea behind this myth is that Advertising and other campaigns can push less quality content above higher quality content. There is no doubt about that. However, I think this is the outlier case. More often than not, the higher quality will win.
myth: The biggest is the duplicate content penalty. People think that just because you publish the same content as somebody else you are going to get some kind of penalty, not the case at all.
src: What’s The Biggest SEO Myth? | Shark SEO myth: Multiple Domain names for the same website or content interlinking together
src: Multiple domain names myth: Multiple Domain Names Pointing to the Same Site Increase Rankings
src: Page 4 – SEO Myths myth: Google penalizes websites with duplicate content.
src: Common SEO Myths – Free SEO Tutorial (Part 5) Scott’s Take: Google has stated publicly, that duplicate content will be merged together and you will lose the value of the content. So, although this myth is strictly true in this example, because the first google will determine which of the duplicate content should rank, it is much better to have unique content.
myth: One myth I frequently see on SEO websites is ALT tag abuse. The ALT element on an image is useful, but only of the image is linked.
src: What’s The Biggest SEO Myth? | Shark SEO Scott’s Take: Google states in their own report card and own guidelines that the ALT attribute is useful, although I agree you don’t want to just stuff it with all keywords.
myth: Sculpting Your PageRank
src: SEO myths and the power of repetition Scott’s Take: This is an advanced technique, and Matt Cutts of Google recently stated, if you gobs and gobs of pages, then yes, Sculpting Page Rank will work, but for the majority of people, it does not help and maybe even hurt.
myth: You should use nofollow for any links you sell
src: SEO myths and the power of repetition Scott’s Take: Note, google recommends this. Its not required, but I’d agree that if you sell links, you generally want to nofollow them.
myth: Google not only looks at your domains whois info (and past history, etc), but Google looks at other domains that are owned by you to see how trustworthy you and your domains are.
src: Few SEO Myths I am Researching – JonWaraas.com
myth: You need to post new articles to your website regularly
src: Common SEO Myths – Free SEO Tutorial (Part 5) myth: You need to update your site frequently.
src: Top Ten Organic SEO Myths Scott’s Take: I agree it is not a need. However, google does sometimes look to see if content is updated. I agree though, that google likes people who are first with content rather than newer. So, this one is inconclusive.
myth: You need ‘quality’ backlinks to succeed in SEO.
src: Common SEO Myths – Free SEO Tutorial (Part 5) Scott’s Take: Again, google recommends you build links in its own guide. So, agree its not a need, but it definitely does help.
myth: You need to post ‘quality’ articles on your website.
src: Common SEO Myths – Free SEO Tutorial (Part 5) Scott’s Take: Google’s own guide recommends to have grammatically correct articles. The benefit of quality articles is who would people rather read? a poorly written, hard to understand article vs. an easy to scan easy to understand article? I think people go with the latter, and then ultimately Google will index that way as well.
myth: Optimize your site for Search Engines, Spiders, and Crawlers.
src: Write For People, Not For Spiders myth: SEO copywriting sounds forced and Mechanical.
src: Five Myths About SEO Copywriting Debunked | WordStream myth: I should optimize my site for search engines above users.
src: Top 10 SEO myths revealed Scott’s Take: The myth here is we should write and optimize for our users’ first and search engines second. Be Natural with your writing.
myth: I should try to rank well for a single-word term instead of the 2- to 3-word phrases that searchers actually use and that I actually have a hope of ranking well for.
src: SEO 101: Myths and Facts about Search Engine Optimization
myth: Any time my rankings go up or down, I should assume that it’s the result of some change I made. Even better, if my rankings drop I should assume that someone at Google manually looked at my site and penalized it.
src: SEO 101: Myths and Facts about Search Engine Optimization myth: Any time my rankings change, or even disappear from the results, I should consider that change permanent.
src: SEO 101: Myths and Facts about Search Engine Optimization
myth: H1 (or any header tags) must be used for high rankings.
src: Top Ten Organic SEO Myths myth: Adding H1 tags to keywords directly help in SEO
src: Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths Scott’s Take: Google does recommend header tags, and think it helps, but of course it is not a requirement.
myth: I’ll see results from SEO quickly.
src: Top 10 SEO myths revealed Scott’s Take: quite contrary. SEO results often focused on the long-term horizon.
myth: If I click on my own links a bunch of times, Google will be tricked into thinking that my site is awesome.
src: SEO myths de-bunked: Myth #1 – Link Clicking – S.Joy Studios Scott’s Take: This is a myth. However, google does use the bounce rate as a search ranking factor. So, if you click on your site and stay a while, you can impact your bounce rate a little which in turn can improve your ranking.
myth: Leaving your website’s link in blog and forum comments is great for SEO.
src: Website SEO: Link-Building Myths and Illuminating Facts (Part 1) Scott’s Take: Most of the links in blog and forum comments are nofollow-ed. Consequently, google does not give those much pagerank value. However, if you leave thoughtful comments, you will actually see your traffic increase. In addition, you will likely see more people linking to you. However, if you leave bogus comments, people will think you are spam.
myth:You need / don’t need a plugin for SEO.
src: http://octavity.com/ Scott’s notes: Some themes come already optimized with SEO, Some themes need the plugin. Also, too many SEO plugins and are worse than having no SEO in your wordpress at all.
myth: Using Robots.txt is the safest way to keep a page/site from being crawled.
src: Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths myth: Adding Canonical URL tag to a page will stop the bots from scanning the page.
src: Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths myth: Using a meta nofollow header tag on the page will “block” the search engine from crawling the page.
src: Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths Scott’s Take: the safest way is just don’t post it on the internet.
myth: Changing the crawl rate settings in Webmasters tools console will change the Google Crawl rate once and for all.
src: Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths
myth: A deep directory structure is bad for SEO.
src: Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths Scott’s Take: Google does recommend against a deep directory structure unless it is really required by your site.
Obviously, not all of these myths should be taken as Gospel. As with normal fictional stories, there is often a grain a truth that can be found in the myth.
For 80% of the small and medium business websites out there, Search Engine Optimization should be 20% of your web activity. The rest of your activity should be concentrated on generating the absolute best, unique, and new content for your targeted market niche(s). I know one of the Myths of SEO is about quality. However, I have found in my experience that most websites are just not producing enough new, unique, fabulous content. Start there. As long as you follow the major beginner guidelines for SEO, you will be fine.
What are those guidelines? I’ll leave that for another post. In the meantime, you can look at these other important references used to verify the myths above.
