Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

A couple days ago I got my regular newsletter from Search Engine Land with an awesome article on SEO myths that just keep sticking around. If you’re an SEO you know what I’m talking about – those myths that you have to answer to every couple days and when you say it’s a myth, the client responds as if you’re an idiot because they heard it from some very knowledgeable person on a forum somewhere and that person had 37 posts so they must know a lot right?

Well Stephan Spencer, Vice President of SEO Strategies at Covario wrote a great article on 36 myths and while I do tend to disagree with some of the assertions he makes (as I’m sure he woudl disagree with some of mine) it’s a highly worthwhile read. Below you’ll find his list but to read the full scoop you’ll just have to head over to read the full story on Search Engine Watch. The URL for that is below the list but first – here’s his 36 myths:

1. Our SEO firm is endorsed/approved by Google.
2. Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you.
3. Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings.
4. Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings.
5. Since the advent of personalization, there is no such thing as being ranked #1 anymore because everyone sees different results.
6. Meta tags will boost your rankings.
7. It’s good practice to include a meta robots tag specifying index, follow.
8. It’s helpful if your targeted keywords are tucked away in HTML comment tags and title attributes (of IMG and A HREF tags.)
9. Having country-specific sites creates “duplicate content” issues in Google.
10. You can keep search engines from indexing pages linked-to with Javascript links.
11. Googlebot doesn’t read CSS.
12. You should end your URLs in .html.
13. You can boost the Google rankings of your home page for a targeted term by including that term in the anchor text of internal links.
14. It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.)
15. Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings.
16. Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings.
17. It’s considered “cloaking” — and is thus taboo and risky — to clean up the URLs in your links selectively and only for spiders.
18. If you define a meta description, Google uses it in the snippet. .
19. The bolding of words in a Google listing signifies that they were considered in the rankings determination.
20. H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO.
21. There are some unique ranking signals for Google Mobile Search, and they include the markup being “XHTML Mobile”.
22. SEO is a black art.
23. The Disallow directive in robots.txt can get pages de-indexed from Google.
24. SEO is a one-time activity you complete and are then done with. .
25. Automated SEO is black-hat or spammy.
26. A site map isn’t for people.
27. There’s no need to link to all your pages for the spiders to see them. Just list all URLs in the XML Sitemap.
28. Google will not index pages that are only accessible by a site’s search form.
29. Placing links in teeny-tiny size font at the bottom of your homepage is an effective tactic to raise the rankings of deep pages in your site.
30. Using a service that promises to register your site with “hundreds of search engines” is good for your site’s rankings.
31. Home page PageRank on a domain means something.
32. Outsourcing link building to a far-away, hourly contractor with no knowledge of your business is a good link acquisition solution.
33. The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters.
34. Keyword density is da bomb..
35. Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO.
36. Great Content = Great Rankings.

To read the full article (with explanations of why he believes they’re all myths) head over to http://searchengineland.com/36-seo-myths-that-wont-die-but-need-to-40076.

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 4:11 pm