5 Search Engine Optimization Myths I Like To Laugh At

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, April 11, 2008 Comments (4)

Seomul Davis wrote a great article on SEO News about 10 myths of Search Engine Optimization that webmasters perpetuate among themselves. I agree that all 10 myths are very prominent and he is right to debunk them. But there are five that are so wrong and funny that I just laugh at them uproariously as many of the people perpetuating these are Search Engine Optimization experts and should know better.

Laughable SEO Myth #1 – You must submit your website to search engines. Hey, guess what guys! Search engines, they have spiders. Spiders crawl. Through links. Put up a web page and link it to another one and you’ll get crawled. Simple as that. Now you can finish laughing.

Laughable SEO Myth #2 – PPC will hurt your rankings. Or help it. Are you kidding? They don’t have anything to do with each other! That’s like saying drinking Kool-Aid will get you more dates. Sure, I’m laughing.

Laughable SEO Myth #3 – The keywords meta tag must be filled in. Actually, none of your meta tags MUST be filled in. The search engines will still crawl your pages and rank them. Your meta tags can influence how you appear in the search engine results pages. Even then, there’s no guarantee because Google has been known to ignore keywords tags and description tags altogether. That doesn’t mean you should leave them blank. It doesn’t mean you can’t either.

OK, now quit laughing.

Laughable SEO Myth #4 – Your Search Engine Optimization copy should be 250 words at least. So if I just write 249 words on a page then I won’t get ranked? Please, don’t make me laugh. Good SEO content is still good Search Engine Optimization content no matter how long it is.

Laughable SEO Myth #5 – Long tail keywords are best. For who?

Does this make any sense? Your broad keyword has a demand of 100,000. Your long tail has a demand for 5,000. I’ll shoot for that 5,000 mark because I can get more traffic. Twisted logic. And very laugable. I’m all over myself. In fact, long tail keywords are as saturated as broad keywords are now when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. What you should do instead is work out a niche and target it like crazy.

Comments (4) Category: SEO

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4 Comments

Comment by Eric Martindale

Made Friday, 11 of April , 2008 at 3:32 pm

Put up a web page and link it to another one and you’ll get crawled. Simple as that. Now you can finish laughing.

Put up a web page and link to it from another one and you’ll get crawled. Simple as that. Now you can finish laughing.

Comment by namecritic

Made Friday, 11 of April , 2008 at 3:59 pm

Myth #6 – Google likes CSS better than HTML therefore CSS built websites rank higher than html websites.

An SEO company told one of my clients this one recently. I’m still laughing. CSS is very useful. CSS is less code. CSS is a good thing. CSS will not necessarily get you ranked better in any search engines.

Comment by internet marketing

Made Tuesday, 12 of August , 2008 at 5:38 pm

Laughable SEO Myth #3 – The keywords meta tag must be filled in. Actually, none of your meta tags MUST be filled in. The search engines will still crawl your pages and rank them. Your meta tags can influence how you appear in the search engine results pages. Even then, there’s no guarantee because Google has been known to ignore keywords tags and description tags altogether. That doesn’t mean you should leave them blank. It doesn’t mean you can’t either.

Google ignores the meta tag keywords but there is no way you can say that G ignores the description tag. Unless you have a DMOZ listing, Google will most likely show your description tag in their SERPs.

Comment by namecritic

Made Wednesday, 13 of August , 2008 at 12:27 pm

The question I have is “Why is it whenever a post is made about SEO, we always get comments based on what google does or does not do?”

Google optimization is a necessary part of SEO, but google is not the only source of traffic, so only applying what google does when discussing an idea leaves out a lot of what SEO is about.

For instance, does anyone know for a fact that yahoo and msn ignore the keywords metatag? How about ask.com? Personally, I want traffic from other source besides google just as much as I want google traffic, so I like to cover all the bases. Using the keywords meta doesn’t hurt you, so why would you ever leave it blank?