Over the last decade many myths and misconceptions about search engines and how they operate have emerged. The popularity of search engines have grown exponentially and currently over 100 million people use search engines daily. Search engines have adapted to the increased search volumes by changing their algorithms and refining their indexing systems. These changes have led to some misconceptions and myths about search engines and the ranking of web pages on the search results.
It is important to be familiar with the guidelines and requirements of each search engine and not to be fooled by myths or misconceptions. Your search engine optimization strategy should be based on facts in order to be effective. In this article we will be taking a closer look at some of the more common search engine myths and misconceptions.
Submitting your Website URL to Search Engines.
Around 20 years ago in the early 1990's search engines used submission forms that webmasters and site owners would use in order to submit information about their sites and pages to the search engines. Search engine bots would then crawl these sites and index the information. This practise eventually gave way to purely crawl-based search engines and from early 2001 search engine submission has not been required any longer. The search engines have all publicly noted that they rarely use the submission URL lists and that links from trusted sites will expose the search engines to your content naturally.
The use of Meta Tags.
In the early days SEO used to be all about meta tags. Consistent abuse of especially the meta keyword tag has reduced the importance of meta tags in SEO. The meta title , meta description and meta robots tags are still important and should form part of your website SEO. Search engines have reduced the value that meta tags play in their search algorithms and your site will not achieve high rankings based on the effective use of meta tags only.
The use of Keywords on your Web Page.
Keyword density has been a buzz word associated with SEO for a long time. The excessive use of keywords in your web page content do not improve keyword rankings but do lead to a poor user experience. Content that people want to link to is more valuable than content stuffed with your keywords.
The use of Pay-Per-Click Advertising to Boost Rankings.
There is a myth that paid search helps to bolster organic search rankings. This has never been proven and the search engines make use of effective walls in their organizations to prevent this from happening. Big businesses spending millions on paid search have found that they could not influence the organic search rankings of their keywords.
Building 1000's of Links in a Short Period of Time.
One of the bigger SEO myths is that your website keyword rankings will improve drastically by generating 1000's of links to your website in a short period of time. There are some SEO consultants or companies that provide this service and they build the links by submitting your website URL to directories and search engines or by building links through the use of link farms. Very few links that are build from directory submissions have any value (Dmoz and the Yahoo directory being the exceptions). Links build by using link farms or build from sites with a bad reputation will result in penalties or a big drop in your keyword rankings.
The most effective method of improving your keyword rankings on the search results is by using great content on your web pages. Effective keyword optimization through the use of your keywords in page titles and the anchor text of links is vital. Building high quality links from trusted websites will add a lot of value to your SEO campaign. It takes time to achieve and retain high rankings on the search results and it is very important to build a solid online reputation and brand.
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