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Organic SEO Top 10 Myths
By Seomul Davis (c) 2008

There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These
misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on
partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being
proved wrong.

Here is an example: Let's assume you make a change to your
website content. Maybe after a few days you notice that your
Google ranking for a certain keyword has altered. Now, it would
be natural for you to assume that your content change had led to
change in ranking. However, it may not be true. Your ranking
could have changed due to several reasons, and may have
absolutely nothing to do with the changes made to the content.

Of course, this action of mixing up the cause and effect is a
common error on the part of new SEOs. Well, if it were limited
to just their work, I wouldn't really mind it. But these guys
are clueless and many a times spread their ignorance to other
newbies on blogs and forums and create a ripple effect of newer
myths. Here, I am making an attempt to discuss and clear the top
10 organic SEO myths:

Organic SEO Myth 1: You must submit your website URL to search
engines. Once upon a time, this could have been the "in" thing.
But since the past 5-6 years it has become unnecessary.

Organic SEO Myth 2: In order to get better ranking, you
absolutely need a Google Sitemap. It's partially correct.
However, if you have built your site properly (ensured its
crawler-friendly) you don't require a Google Sitemap. That being
said, having one won't hurt you and you can even use other
Webmaster Central tools offered by Google, but this doesn't
guarantee higher ranking.

Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website
regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly
increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website
rankings. Only update your website content if it is necessary and
not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter
of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that
haven't been updated in years!

Organic SEO Myth 4: PPC (pay per click) ads can help or hurt
rankings. What amuses me most is that many people believe
that participating in Google AdWords campaigns will hurt their
organic SEO ranking, while many others believe that PPC will
spike the traffic and up the ranking. All I can say is that
neither of this is true!

Organic SEO Myth 5: Not following guidelines on Google will ban
your website. Google's guidelines are common sense but not
mandatory. It's advisable to read them, however just don't do
anything purely for search engines and you'll be fine.

Organic SEO Myth 6: Buying links can lead to banning of your
website. It is partially true again. Google doesn't like to
count paid links as votes for a website page. Mostly Google is
unable to find out if the links are paid for, but even if it
does, it won't count the links. Google won't ban your website in
any case. A quick update - Google has made it easier to report
paid links in sites that are unrelated to your site. Though the
reasoning is yet unclear and best practice should tell you don't
buy links in unrelated sites to your theme.

Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure
high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this
is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google
positioning without H1 but they certainly don't hurt so use H
tags correctly.

Organic SEO Myth 8: Meta keywords tag need to be used on your
page. The fact is that a Meta keyword tag was introduced to use
keywords that are NOT on the site page already! However, this
tag is ignored by Google in any case.

Organic SEO Myth 9: The SEO copy should be 250 words in length.
250 words is not really an optimal number nor is it specific for
SEO rankings. Easily, 250 words allows one to write good
marketing copy and can be optimized for 3-5 main key phrases.
However, shorter SEO copy works just as well.

Organic SEO Myth 10: Your pages should be optimized for the
long tail keywords. This is not true. Nowadays, long-tail
keyword phrases are no longer effective as not many pages use
them and not many people search using long tails. You can
include these keywords in blogs or even an article, but that is
not really optimization.

Remember don't go spreading any SEO myths that you believe may
be true. Test it yourself several times on different websites
before reaching any conclusion as there are other factors
involved as well.
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Seomul Davis is a SEO Services expert with SEO 1 Services a
Dallas based search engine optimization company
(http://www.seo-1-marketing-services.com) and a frequent
contributor on http://www.seo-services-expert.com.
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