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Misunderstandings about SEO

  • May 04, 2016
  • Bradley Taylor

SEO SphereBack in the stone age of SEO, the late 1990’s, there was a form to fill out to submit to search engines.  This form would have site titles and keywords on them. That’s it. It was the infancy of SEO. And it didn’t last very long. Many of the keywords were spam. The practice of submitting forms was virtually gone by 2001. As you can expect, things got a lot more complicated from there. 

Since keywords are the most common way someone is going to find you on the web, here are some misconceptions about them. Meta tags are no longer used. Businesses would put in a list of keywords to be ranked upon. If someone typed in those keywords, Presto!, your site would come up. Again, you can blame spam for ruining this. Also, it doesn’t matter how many times you use a keyword or phrase in your web content, it’s not going to improve your ranking on a search engine. If you say, “When looking for a cheap plumber in Melbourne, Florida we are the place to go to find that cheap plumber and we will give you the best value a cheap plumber in Melbourne, Florida can offer.”, by using the phrase “cheap plumber” many times it is not going to raise your ranking. It actually sounds ridiculous. Another misconception about SEO is raising your ranking by paying for advertising on a search engine. There is no evidence that this common conspiracy will affect your rankings. The reputable search engines put up walls to stop this type of crossover activity.

Search engines have guidelines that they follow. The idea is to show the same information to their web crawlers that you would show a person. That means that in building a website, remember that a web crawler will not recognize “cloaked” content. If a person couldn’t see it, they won’t recognize it either.

Many newer, independent web businesses feel that search engines give big brand name companies preference in ranking. This has to do with the earned links your domain has. It’s all about trustworthiness. Is your content unique? Are you duplicating other websites? Have you linked to spammy websites? Having links to your site from trusted sites might even override and duplicating or non-uniqueness your domain has. The more hits on your site from CNN will rank you better than the hits from Don’s News and Deli. All this will factor into your ranking.