Myths and misconceptions about SEO and search engines

Myths and misconceptions about SEO and search engines

Over the past few years, there have been a number of misconceptions about how the search engines work. For the beginning SEO this causes confusion about what is needed to perform effectively. In this section we will explain the real story behind the myths. In classic SEO times (late 1990s), search engines had input forms that were part of the optimization process. Webmasters and site owners tagged their sites and pages with keyword information and submitted them to the engines. Shortly after submission, a bot would crawl and include those resources in their index. Simple SEO!

Unfortunately, this process did not go very well, the entries were often spam. Since 2001, not only has the submission of the search engine been required, but it has become virtually unusable. The engines publicly indicate that they rarely use submitted URLs and that it is the best way to earn links from other sites.

You can still sometimes find submission pages, but these are relics from the past and unnecessary in the practice of modern SEO. If you hear a pitch from an SEO that offers search engine submission services, then run, don't walk, to a true SEO professional. Even if the engines use the shipping service to crawl your site, you probably wouldn't earn enough linkjuice to be included in their indices or to look for searches competitively.

Meta tags
Once at a time, meta tags (especially the tag meta keywords) were an important part of the SEO process. You include the keywords on which your site should be ranked and when users have typed those terms, your page can be displayed in a query. This process was quickly registered as spam and was eventually discarded as an important placement signal by all major search engines.

Other tags, in particular the title tag and the meta description tag, are crucial for quality SEO. In addition, the meta-robots tag is an important tool for managing crawler access. So, while understanding the functions of meta tags is important, they are no longer the central focus of SEO.

Keyword stuffing
Have you ever seen a page that just looks spammy? Maybe something like:

"Bob's cheap plumber in Seattle is the best cheap plumber in Seattle for all your sanitation. Contact a cheap plumber in Seattle before it's too late."

It is not surprising that a persistent myth in SEO revolves around the concept that keyword density (the number of words on a page divided by the number of copies of a particular keyword) is used by the search engines for relevance and ranking calculations.

Although it is refuted time and time again, this myth is not true. Many SEO tools still feed on the concept that keyword density is an important statistic. It doesn't work that way. Ignore it and use keywords in an intelligent and useful way. The value of an additional 10 copies of your keyword on the page is much less than earning one good editorial link from a source that doesn't think you are a search engine spammer.

Paid searches help enhance organic results
Pay attention; it's time for the most common SEO conspiracy theory: spending on search engine advertisements (pay-per-click or PPC) improves your organic SEO rankings.

In our vast experience and research, we have never seen evidence that paid advertisements have a positive impact on organic search results. Google, Bing and Yahoo! have all set up walls in their organization to prevent this type of crossover.

At Google, advertisers who spend tens of millions of dollars every month have noticed that they can't even get special access or consideration from search quality or web spam teams. As long as the search engines retain this separation, the idea that paid search supports biological results must remain a myth.

SPAM FOR SEARCH ENGINES
There will be spam as long as searches are made. The practice of spamming pages and schemas for creating search engines designed to artificially increase rankings or abuse ranking algorithms has increased since the mid-1990s. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for two reasons and in our opinion less and less worthwhile:

1. Not worth the effort

Users hate spam and the search engines have a financial incentive to combat it. Many believe that Google's biggest product advantage over the past 10 years was the ability to control and remove spam better than its competitors. It is undoubtedly something that all search engines spend a lot of time, effort and resources on. Although spam sometimes still works, it generally takes more effort to succeed than to produce good content, and long-term payouts are virtually non-existent.

Instead of investing all that time and effort into something that the search engines throw away, why don't you invest in a long-term value-added strategy?

2. Smarter search engines
Search engines have achieved remarkable performance by identifying scalable, intelligent methodologies to combat spam manipulation, making it dramatically more difficult to adversely affect their intended algorithms. Metrics such as the TrustRank of Moz, statistical analysis and historical data have all driven down the value of search spam and made the tactics of SEO (which do not violate search engine guidelines) much more attractive.

More recently, Google's Panda update introduced complex machine learning algorithms to combat spam and other low-value pages, and search engines continue to innovate and raise the bar for delivering quality results.

The most important thing to remember is this: manipulative techniques will generally not help, and they often result in search engines that impose fines on your site. So you achieve the opposite. Therefore, contact a specialist in the field of SEO. Sofco is such a specialist that has already proven itself and has helped existing and new start-ups to make their company easier to find via the organic search results of search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.