Search Engine Optimization Myths

You have no doubt been told you can make your website better to appear in the search engines top rankings by using meta-tags and cheap tricks. We are going to burst your bubble and tell you why its not true.

Anyone claiming to be able to make your site appear in the top 30 results is lying to you, and likely either speaking with no knowledge of the Internet or trying to get you to spend money to do it.

First you need to understand how lucrative the Search Engine business is. With google.com now valued in the billions of dollars and earning equally impressive numbers the search engines are impressive and formitable and not easily tricked.

With 8 billion web pages indexed the chance of you being number 1 are 1 in 8 billion, about 1000 times less likely than winning the lottery.

If anyone could build a website that was going to appear in the top 30 results they would. And that would mean the companies with the most money would always appear first. But as you know, that is not true. If a company that spend 10 million dollars a year on their website is not listed, what makes you think you will be?

The search engines use hundreds of parameters to rank your site. The most important of which is age. They have built in time parameters to index pages at a slow rate. This insures page reliability and availability and prevents spam type sites from popping up daily.

If you build a website, it is likely that only the main page will be indexed, at least in the first few months of its life. Over the next year, more and more pages are added and you earn the search engines respect by having the pages up and running with quality content.

Based on the dynamics of the websites pages, the search engine will come back at some regular interval. That interval could be as much as 6 months. That means if you make a change, it may not even see it for several months.

Even if you could maximize a website for higher placement, it would be many months before you could see the result. If the changes were wrong, you could loose a year by attempting to beat the search engine.

The search engines also deal with spammers and seo scammers every minute, so they know what to look for and when people are trying to make their site, search optimized. If they see one of these patterns, they will remove your website completely. Is that a chance you are willing to take?

One common myth is <meta tags>: meta tags are seen by most search engines as spam, or a deliberate attempt to trick them into placing your page higher in certain keywords. More sites are damaged by meta tags than are helped.

If you have the words "used cars" in your meta tag, but do not have the words in your pages, they assume the site is not relevent to the tag and you are black listed and possibly removed.

Another myth is submitting services: If you continuously submit a website to a search engine or attempt to use automated systems or programs to submit it, all you do is make the search engine angry. You are using up their resources when the site is already included in the crawl list. If you don't believe us, read the help section at any search engine. They tell you outright if you do that, they will not include your website.

The truth is, the search algorithms know the tricks and have big money riding on their search results. If you play that game, be prepared to loose.

Keep your site honest with text rich pages and you will eventually get your fair share of traffic.