SEO myths

I bet there’s not one of you out there today who has not tried something really weird that you wouldn’t normally do when designing a website to help you rank better in the search engines. In this article I hope to point out a few SEO myths and why they are not true.

KEYWORD DENSITY
Ok so you’ve all probably heard that you need to repeat your keywords several times, or Google will never find you for it. This may be true for the first few months after getting indexed by Google, but once you have been indexed longer than 6 months; keyword density is not a big contributing factor in SEO. If you have your keyword in your title tag and the page is highly relevant to the keyword, then you should rank well for it, it may not be straight away, but with SEO you have to be patient. So if your looking for big rankings then repeating your keyword every 4 words is not the way to go.

AVOID NOFOLLOW LINKS
Webmasters are informed to avoid nofollow links at all cost. This is entirely untrue in my opinion. If you follow a blog which has a nofollow plugin installed on it’s comments then this should not let this stop you posting a link to your site, aslong as you have got something useful to say. You don’t necessarily have to use your keyword as your anchor text. If you write good comments, people will come to your site because you know what you are doing, people don’t click on spam comments. So even if you don’t get any improvements in Google, nofollow links may give you higher traffic from other high traffic blogs.

SPAMMING KEYWORDS IN META DESCRIPTIONS AND META KEYWORDS
This should not be done. The Meta keyword tag is no longer used by any big search engines, but you should still include it for the smaller ones, just have about 3 of your main keywords, to give you the least possible chance of getting penalized for spamming. The Meta description tag is used by the search engines, but not for ranking purposes. All it does is give you the chance to write something interesting about your web pages, to influence people to click on your site. So if your site is top of the rankings and your meta description doesn’t sell your site, peoples sites in 3rd and 4th positions may get more traffic than your site in 1st.