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Every day a new search engine optimization myth is born; unfortunately, not every day does an old myth die off. The net result is a growing population of myths. These are nearly impossible to squash because snake-oil salesmen keep perpetuating them - bringing them back from the brink, even. You can talk at conferences till you're blue in the face. You can develop definitive SEO checklists or even write a top rated SEO book (e.g., The Art of SEO ). You'll still get asked how to write good meta keywords.
I, for one, hate misinformation and disinformation, and the SEO industry, unfortunately, is rife with it. I'm going to do my part in fighting this menace and spreading the truth - by exposing some of the more insidious myths in this very article.
And now, without any further ado, the list.
MYTHS ABOUT CONTENT:
Great content equals (i.e., automatically leads to) great rankings. Just like great policies equal successful politicians, right?
Meta tags will boost your rankings. Fact: Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete waste of time. They have been so abused by spammers that the engines haven't put any stock in them for years. In fact, Google never did support this meta tag. None of the various meta tags are given any real weight in the rankings algorithm.
If you define a meta description, Google uses it in the snippet. We already learned from my last column ("Anatomy of a Google Snippet") that this is oftentimes not the case.
Tweaking your meta description is the way to optimize the Google snippet's conversion potential. As I described in that article, the snippet content can be cobbled together from data from multiple sources. There's an ideal keyword density value that you should optimize to. Find it by measuring KD of your high-ranking competitors.
Placing links in a teeny-tiny size font at the bottom of your homepage is an effective tactic to raise the rankings of deep pages in your site. Better yet, make the links the same color as the page background (I'm being facetious). Google's algorithms are obviously more sophisticated...