5 SEO Myths – Don’t be Misled

1. Keyword Rich Domain Names. It has been spread about by keyword crazy amateur SEOs that you should include your keywords in your domain name to increase your rankings. This is not true. The best domain name is short, easy to remember and if possible includes your company name.

2. Meta Keyword Tags. The Meta Keyword Tag was given a lot of weight early on in the first days of Search Engine Optimization, but as with any other factor that becomes known people abused it. Now it does very little. You may still want to include your keywords here, but it will not do much and most search engines aren’t looking out for this.

3. Bold or Italicized Text. Using these tricks on keywords may make them jump out at the reader, but that is about it. This practice has little to no affect on your search engine ranking, and may irritate your users. Believe me, Google can find your keywords with no help from you.

4. Content Length: There is no search engine rule stating that your content needs to be a 300 words, 500 words, or 800 words in order to get indexed. Recommended length should be looked at in the framework of how it helps your reader, and whatever is necessary to get the point across succinctly and completely is advised. What would YOU expect to have to read on any particular topic?

5. Duplicate Content: This is my pet peeve. People who know next to nothing scream about ‘duplicate content’ – posting specific content like an article or blog entry on your site and then on another site will not get you penalized. Google will recognize that the content is the same and may only choose one of the pages to display, but it will not hurt your rankings.

What you need to decide is if you want one version to rank higher than another, and link build to provide PageRank accordingly. I have had articles written for clients that subsequently showed up four times in the top ten spots on Google – did they complain? NO! In fact, they figured the more visibility the better.

The only time you need to worry about dupe content is if someone else scrapes your content – if they are bang up link builders you run the risk of having their site beat yours out for top ranking for the content. You can issue a notice to force them to take it down, or offer to have them display a snippet only and link back to your preferred listing