7 SEO Myths That Just Won't Go Away

Search Engine Optimisation is changing day by day, and the techniques that worked one month often simply won't work the next month. Unfortunately some website owners simply refuse to acknowledge this fact and therefore continue to use the same old tools and techniques they've always used to try to achieve a good search engine ranking - even though a lot of these so called tools and techniques no longer work and should be consigned to the 'myth' category.

So what SEO tools and techniques are now widely accepted to be myths?

1. The higher the keyword density of your website content the better your search engine ranking will be.
   This used to be true to a certain degree, but because spammers realized that keyword stuffing boosted ranking they took it to the extreme, with the result that now keyword stuffing can earn your website a review or even worse an outright ban. The same goes for the continual repetition of a single keyword. Any website that focuses exclusively on a single keyword will often be classed as a sp@m site and disregarded by Google and the other big search engines. It's much better from an SEO point of view to concentrate on several keyword phrases that you know (through research) are searched more than most in your niche market.
   
   
2. Putting your main SEO keyword in your Meta Tags will boost your search engine rankings.
   Again this used to be true, but the spammers took this to excess as well. Now it doesn't really matter whether you include your main keyword or keyword phrase in your Meta tags, the main search engines will simply ignore them.
   
   
3. You should concentrate on just one keyword per website page.
   This myth is related to the first one in that concentrating on a single keyword per page can lead to you inadvertently getting flagged for spamming. You only need to exceed the recommended keyword density by a relatively small percentage to get yourself noticed by the search engine spiders and bots. Therefore, it is again advisable to have one main keyword per page but also to include several popular alternatives as well.
   
   
4. Website search engine optimisation only needs to be done once.
   This is the most frustrating SEO myth of them all! Obviously if the rules of SEO are constantly changing then the SEO you use on your website needs to change accordingly. It's pointless having useless, generic content stuffed with keywords on your site if the search engines now blatantly ignore such content. It's also pointless sticking with old keywords when internet users have refined their search terms e.g. they may have searched for 'iPhone' when you initially did your website SEO, but now they probably search for 'iPhone 4' or 'iPhone 3GS' etc. SEO is an ongoing process and although you don't necessarily need to update your content on a daily basis you do have to work at it on a regular basis to stay up with the competition.
   
   
5. Trading links helps to boost rankings.
   At one point website owners used to trade links with other website owners simply because they knew search engines such as Google looked favorably at sites with incoming and outgoing links. These huge scale linking strategies are now frowned upon by most search engines, and especially when the linking websites are seen to have absolutely no connection with each other, i.e., they are totally unrelated in every way. This SEO myth is also one of the funniest because some website owners still believe that search engines won't be able to recognize a useful link from a spam link. Non-useful links are easily caught and discounted by search engines and as a form of SEO they are now worthless unless the link building strategy is done correctly and are from authorative sites.
   
   
6. My home page will always rank highest so I should concentrate my SEO here.
   Search engine spiders and bots no longer read and index your home page more thoroughly than the rest of your website; a fact that means you need to optimise your entire website with just as much effort as you do your home page. It isn't uncommon for internal website pages to rank much higher for certain keywords than home pages so in order to cover all bases you must perform search engine optimisation on your entire site - and this includes contact pages and other seemingly un-index-able pages.
   
   
7. All search engines use the same parameters to rank websites.
   Again this is a huge myth that people tend to forget. Google uses well over 200 individual factors to rank a website and these are constantly being changed and updated and it's more than possible that Bing uses over 200 as well - but you can be sure they don't use those same 200 factors.

The upshot of all these differences means that the SEO tactics you use to achieve a high ranking on Google may not get you the same high rank on Bing or Yahoo or any of the other search engines. It's important that you don't try to satisfy every search engine with your SEO techniques or you could end up in a big mess and ranking low everywhere.

There are of course numerous other SEO myths floating around the internet, but these 7 are the ones that just never seem to go away.