SEO Myths

Posted on | June 23, 2006 |

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I always enjoy some of the answers I get when questioning experts on SEO tactics. I just wanted to briefly cover a couple of them here, just to ensure that you know what you’re getting into.

Submit your site every week - Not a good idea. Many search engines will actually penalize you for it. Defintely perform an initial submission and maybe once a month for the first few months but get yourself a Google SiteMap and establish a nice linking campaign and they’ll return all by themselves.

SEO is too expensive - I don’t think so and in comparison to other marketing efforts, it’s actually substantially cheaper. On one campaign I did over the course of a year, the company’s print marketing campaign was huge, mine was practically insignificant but in the end, generated far more users to the designated landing page.

PPC is more effective - Sure in the short term you’re going to get faster results. In the long run however, you’re looking at folks preferring to click on organic search results 5:1. Give it a year and hopefully you’ll be there.

All I need is Meta Tags and Good Content to rank well - definitely not true especially for Google. For now you may do OK on MSN and Yahoo! but Google has a far more comprehensive off-page requirement. Think incoming links, PageRank etc…

Don’t aim for highly competitive keywords - to a certain extent, this can be true. With 146,000,000 sites containing the keyword “SEO”, we’re not going to aggressively waste our time trying to rank well on that particular keyword. What I would go for could be a keyphrase that contains that keyword that is less competitive like “small business SEO” or “Philadelphia SEO” or similar. On the other hand, don’t waste your time going for keywords and phrases that people are not searching on.

There’s a couple of tips you may find useful. Fair Dinkum.