WHAT IS SEO?

The practice which involves the optimization of a website through the improvement of external and internal aspects with a view to maximizing the volume of traffic received by a website from various search engines is called search engine optimization. Firms practicing in seo tend to vary. Some firms prefer to take a generalized and broad approach.

Others tend to focus in a highly specialized manner. Therefore SEO may be defined as trying to make a site the best it could be for search engines like google, yahoo, msn and others as well as for those who will be visiting the site. Search engines first need to find, crawl and index, then determine the relevancy and display the results.
There are many prevalent myths surrounding SEO. And it is time to debunk those myths.

MYTHS ABOUT INDEXING, CRAWLING AND SUBMITTING

There is need for doorway pages.
It is completely outdated and an obsolete practice.

Multiple sites are required.
They don’t help the engines in any way but increase maintenance work and cost.

It is true that frequent spidering will improve rankings.
An Absolutely wrong notion.

Your site should be updated frequently.
No need to do it.

A GOOGLE SITEMAP is an absolute necessity.
It is not required for average sites. The rank of your site will not be improved by it.

You have to submit your URL to search engines.
The truth is that search engines will find your site and index it if you provide a link to your site.

MYTHS ABOUT DESIGN

Black hat design techniques are certainly common.
The java script code is not illegitimate. And black hat is not the only one who uses it.

Flash cannot be used.
If flash is one element of your page, you should certainly use flash, but not if it happens to be a completely flash site.
Flash is best reserved for text based sites.

Navigation should not be images. It has to be text links.
The truth is that if you use ALT tags graphical navigation is absolutely ok.

W3C must validate your HTML code.
Even google cannot provide validation.

MYTHS ABOUT BUILDING LINKS

Presence in yahoo directory and DMOZ is a must to ensure good rankings in google.
Forget it, it is not worth the money.

In search results pages are ranked in the order of page rank.
Wrong again. You can safely ignore the page rank of google toolbar because it is not accurate.

Reciprocal links do not matter.
Reciprocal links do count if they are from the right site.

Accuracy is the second name of google’s link command.
It is in reality useless. The yahoo link command or google webmaster tools are far better.

MYTHS ABOUT PPC

Organic rankings will be affected by PPC ads.
False.

Organic rankings will be improved by PPC ads.
Not at all true.

MYTHS ABOUT CONTENT

Your site will be penalized if you use duplicate content.
No such penalty exists. But duplicates will be filtered out in favor of originals by the search engine or what the search engine considers original.

For long tail searches there is need to optimize.
Not required. Search engines are capable of finding them by themselves.

There is need to optimize a webpage for a single phrase or keyword in every page.
It would be better to optimize each and every page for three to five related phrases. It would make your copy nice to read and cut out on monotony.

A specific density of keyword has to be maintained.
Tools which enable this make no sense.

Making your target keywords bold or italicized is another must.
False.

Page copies have to maintain a certain word limit.
In reality there is no such thing.

MYTHS ABOUT TAG

If keywords are found in comment tags it will adversely affect your rankings.
Completely false.

Keywords should be used in Meta keyword tags. It is also supposed that you have to use only those keywords that pepper the content of your page.
On the contrary, it has been recommended that keyword varieties which are not present in your webpage and misspelt keywords should be included in the keyword tag.

It is necessary to head tags. (A5, A9 etc).
Not required.

Your page URLs should be keyword rich.

Your domain should be rich in keywords.
Neither of the two is required.

MYTHS ABOUT SEO COMPANY

Without doing any on-page work, Seo companies can improve rankings.
Stay far away from these companies making false claims.

Companies claiming to share special relationship with google!
Don’t let such a company take you for a ride. Google doesn’t share relationships with organic SEO firms.

Companies claiming to use proprietary method.
It is a damn lie.

Companies will tamper with your rankings if you stop paying them. Bullshit.

Companies being able to place pages in your desired position.
Unless they use sponsored spots or PPC, this is impossible.

A top ranking generates more sales and traffic.
If you use phrases and keywords which people usually search for, only then will your good ranking be justified.