Five Outdated SEO Myths

Five Outdated SEO Myths

1. Image alt tags help you rank well.
2. The keywords meta tag is important.
3. Keyword density analysis is important.
4. You should optimize a page for single words.
5. You should submit your website to search engines.

Want to Know What You Should Do?

You should watch Wil Reynolds explain this and show you what you should be doing in this video of a speech he gave at last year’s Affiliate Summit. His talk is a treasure chest of how to SEO.

Nearly everything he says is applicable to any kind of site, not just affiliate sales sites (though many bloggers also do affiliate sales, so for you folks this will be a real treat). Following the video player is my written recap of his most important points. My comments on his points are in italics, and I’ve added helpful links. You can skip down to them, but I really suggest watching the video. It’s an hour long, but I wasn’t bored for a second. This is great stuff.

Take Aways

• Diligently use description meta tags.
  Wil states pretty candidly that keywords meta tags and image alt tags don’t much matter, but that there has been a resurgence in description meta tags influencing not just search results but that all-important click on the listing in the SERP.
• Have a circular link structure.
  Make sure that your important content and your home page are well interlinked. One of the best ways to do this on a blog is to have a “most important” or “most popular” posts listing on the home page of your blog. Using drop-down menus are great for circular linking, but only if they are html/css drop downs.
• Have a Site Map–one made for humans, not Google.
• Do not use query strings (equal signs, question marks, and ampersands) in URLs.
  In other words, when using WordPress, use “pretty permalinks.”
• Google doesn’t like dynamic pages.
  Use mod rewrite to make your pages seem static.
• Title tags rule.
  Hands down, the most important thing you can change to improve your SEO is the
  content of your page title tags.
• Content is king.
  If you develop something worth linking to, people will link to it. It’s really
  that simple.
• Be judicious in your linking.
  A link out of ten links is more effective on a page with a PageRank of 3 than a link out of three hundred links in a page with a PageRank of 8. This was a bit of an eye-opener for me.
• Overcome your own bias.
  We all stink at keyword development, because we’re biased by our own search behavior! The terms that you’re already ranking well for are a red herring. You don’t know what people are typing in and searching for and missing you… that’s the problem.
• Overture keyword tool search problems:
  • Broad match: singulars and plurals lumped together is very bad
  • Misspellings “corrected”
  • It ignores spelling and word usage differences for different cultures (USA vs. UK)
• When it comes to research keywords, start “wide.”
  That way, you don’t bias your own results.
• Remember:
  People search for solutions to problems, not the other way around.
• Use Google Trends to discover whether most people search a term using the singular vs. the plural. In fact, Google Trends is highly useful for all kinds of research that you might not think of it for.
• Microsoft AdCenter Labs.
  Search Funnels shows what people searched before a particular term, and then after a particular term.
• Encourage deep linking.
  Not just linking to the home page. Deep linking is great for SEO.

There is really so much more than these points. I’ve watched this video three times already, it’s that helpful. Did you find it helpful and eye opening? Please leave a comment below and let me know!

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