How SEO myths can cost you

Every day a new search engine optimization myth is born; unfortunately, not every day does an old myth die off. The net result is a growing population of myths. These are nearly impossible to squash because snake-oil salesmen keep perpetuating them — bringing them back from the brink, even. You can talk at conferences till you're blue in the face. You can develop definitive SEO checklists or even write a top rated SEO book (e.g.,The Art of SEO). You'll still get asked how to write good meta keywords.

I, for one, hate misinformation and disinformation, and the SEO industry, unfortunately, is rife with it. I'm going to do my part in fighting this menace and spreading the truth — by exposing some of the more insidious myths in this very article.

And now, without any further ado, the list.

MYTHS ABOUT CONTENT:

• Great content equals (i.e., automatically leads to) great rankings. Just like great policies equal successful politicians, right?

• Meta tags will boost your rankings. Fact: Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete waste of time. They have been so abused by spammers that the engines haven't put any stock in them for years. In fact, Google never did support this meta tag. None of the various meta tags are given any real weight in the rankings algorithm.

• If you define a meta description, Google uses it in the snippet. We already learned from my last column (“Anatomy of a Google Snippet”) that this is oftentimes not the case.

• Tweaking your meta description is the way to optimize the Google snippet's conversion potential. As I described in that article, the snippet content can be cobbled together from data from multiple sources. There's an ideal keyword density value that you should optimize to. Find it by measuring KD of your high-ranking competitors.

• Placing links in a teeny-tiny size font at the bottom of your homepage is an effective tactic to raise the rankings of deep pages in your site. Better yet, make the links the same color as the page background (I'm being facetious). Google's algorithms are obviously more sophisticated than this dirty trick.

• Google penalizes for duplicate content. I've long stated that it's a filter, not a penalty. It may feel like a penalty because of the resultant rankings drop, but Google's intention is not to penalize for inadvertent duplication due to tracking parameters, session IDs and other canonicalization snafus.

• H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO: Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO.

• The bolding of words in a Google listing signifies that they were considered in the rankings determination. Fact: This phenomenon — known as “KWiC” in Information Retrieval circles — exists purely for usability purposes.

• It's helpful if your targeted keywords are tucked away in HTML comment tags and title attributes (of IMG and A HREF tags). Since when have comment tags or title attributes been given any weight?

• Validating and cleaning up the HTML will drastically increase the speed of a site or page. The biggest bottleneck to overcome in site speed is not what you think! If you want to be blown away, read Google chief performance engineer Steve Souders' books High Performance Web Sites (for primarily server-side stuff like caching reverse proxies and Gzip compression) and Even Faster Web Sites (for primarily client-side stuff like JavaScript optimization).

• Googlebot doesn't read CSS. You'd better believe Google scans CSS for spam tactics like hidden divs.

• Having country-specific sites creates “duplicate content” issues in Google. Google is smart enough to present your .com.au site to Google Australia users and your .co.nz site to Google New Zealand users. Not using a ccTLD? Then set the geographic target setting in Google Webmaster Tools; that's what it's there for.

• It's important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g., daily.) This is another fallacy. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much.

  • Using Flash will tank your SEO. Flash elements aren't bad for SEO, it's sites that are constructed with a single Flash movie, the absence of links, and text that's been semantically marked up in that creates problems.

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