SEO - When building your site, and trying to figure out how to get more traffic to come when you are done, it doesn’t take long to come across SEO sites and sites that say they have the lowdown on SEO. Some know what they are talking about, some don’t. I’m not going to try to say that I am the all knowing SEO swami, but I’ve done a bit of work with it on various sites I’ve built and seen what does and doesnt work.
    
     SEO Fallacies - Because so many people have no real idea how search engines work, it stands to reason that the entire subject of SEO techniques is shrouded in a cloud of mystery and wrapped in a blanket of B.S. I’ll go over some of the different statements I’ve read about SEO and put down what I have found out by just simply asking.

     SEO is very easy! - Not so fast. While there isn’t really anything extremely difficult about SEO, its not so easy if you don’t know what you’re doing. SEO is not just dumping a link to your website in a search engine directory. Your site needs to be streamlined so that when you do get your into the queue for the spiders and or bots from a search engine to crawl your site, that they wont be turned off by the big steaming pile of code that is your site.

     Meta tags are all you need - No. Meta tags are very important, and you definately should put them into your site’s code. Don’t get me wrong, I know of a couple sites that have no meta information that are fairly high ranked. But they are highly ranked because of their content and the traffic that their linked sites bring in (along with a substantial advertising budget). All things being equal, you definately DO want meta tags, and they do make a difference.

     Keyword Density is the answer - Yes and no. While technically this is a true statement, an even better statement is relevant keywords are the answer. If your keywords are not relevant, not only will your site not get pulled up when someone uses search terms that are relevant to your sites content, you can also be penalized by search engines such as google or msn for having keywords that have nothing to do with your site. Choose wisely.

     You should never redesign your site - Obviously if your site isnt set up correctly for SEO then you may need to do some adjustments. Does this mean a total overhaul? Well that would depend on how out of whack your site is according to SEO requirements. Also, it doesnt hurt every so often (maybe once a year or two) to give your site a facelift. Spruce it up, brush its teeth, comb its hair. A new fresh face will be helpful with bringing in new visitors.

The above are tips that are useful for your site ON your site. The following tips are useful for handling SEO in an offpage environment (things that are physicall on your website/domain).

     Linking is the end all be all for SEO - Linking is a good thing for SEO efforts. But there are some instances where linking can not only NOT help you, but hurt you in a big way. There are many people that have what are called ‘link farms’. A link farm is usually a site that is nothing but links, because the owner of that site is trying to get search engines to rank him higher because he is linked to practically every page on the internet. Search engines usually don’t look favorably upon link farms, and therefore, don’t look favorably upon people with reciprocal links to link farms. This is the kind of thing that will get you ‘grey listed’ or blacklisted from a search engine and only after a couple months and you ‘cleaning up your act’ will you get your ranking back. The moral of the story is, before you start doing links to external sites, check out the site. Make sure that it is a real site, not just an html page that is top to bottom filled with links.

     Multiple domains pointing to your site will increase rankings - Not really. If you have multiple domains that point to your site, most likely they arent set up as a site with similar content. These are considered ‘mirrors’ by search engines and will usually get you penalized (not indexed). If the site looks like a doorway site, then you can also get penalized. However lately doorway sites and mini sites look very similar, just try to get and keep content on your pages.

    The best way to get indexed is repeatedly submitting your site - Repeatedly submitting your url to a search index will not get you indexed any faster. In fact, most website submission portals will usually tell you that multiple submissions will usually get you knocked out of the submission process altogether. Once every 6-8 months is fine.

     These are some basics of SEO myths, hopefully they have helped clear up the murky waters of the subject. Tomorrow I’ll go over more SEO tips to drive traffic, then I’ll apply them to this site to see what kind of changes happen. Again, search engines can be clocked by a calendar, so don’t think that a quick change will suddenly open the floodgates of traffic to your site. It takes 6-8 weeks in some cases, and more in others. Paitience.

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