Bill Slawski starts an SEO Myths thread at Cre8asite that's a true gem. I've excerpted some of my favorite myths he's covered, but it's the evidence and explanations that contain the meat of this post, so take a visit:
MYTHS of SEO:
- SEO copywriting means writing strong copy, then inserting keywords within the copy a number of times.
- Keyword density is important, and you don't want too much or too little.
- You should place content above menus to have it "crawled first"
- Meta tags are the key to high rankings
- The more links the better
- Pagerank is dead
- There are thousands of search engines to submit your site to
- You need to submit your site to the major search engines.
- Resubmitting sites to search engines helps your site get crawled more frequently
- Appearing in DMOZ is essential to high rankings
- High rankings are the aim of SEO (I love this one)
- Optimizing for specific keyword phrases is the goal of SEO (this one too)
- Software, which compares your use of keyword phrases in titles, headlines, meta tags, etc., with pages that rank highly for those terms can help you rank highly for those phrases.
- Participating in pay-per-click or paid impression programs on the search engines can help or harm your search rankings.
- Search engines don't index dynamic sites
Brilliant work, Bill. I'm waiting for the print edition.
Nice. The most worrying thing is when you read those myths on very large "seo" sites, no wonder they never die.
Yep. very nice thread! I think it should be converted into a PDF file and sent to a lot of people, it's worth it...
What a thread. The best I have seen in years. I do believe that filters are in place such as the sandbox filter, and I believe big money words will continue to be difficult for new sites.
D