-By Terry Van Horne
Lee Odden of online marketing blog posted this on Jill Whalen's list of Seo Myths from Jill's seminar presentation at SES Toronto. I have been collecting this kind of reference for the certification program we intend to add to SeoPros and manage through OSEOP.
One of the people I've known in the SEO industry for a long time is Jill Whalen. I respect her ability and "tude" and thoroughly enjoyed our sometimes spirited discussions while we were both Super Mods at IHY forums. We don't agree on some techniques... but ... we both have very strong ideas about what works and is important. So... I'm definitely not disagreeing outright, just that, I have had slightly different experiences with some techniques. That doesn't say one or the other is right or proper only that there is more than one way to do it!
Here are things Jill says you don’t “need” to do or are myths about SEO:
Jills list is bolded and navy
Submitting to a search engine
I agree if there is one thing that has improved on all engines it is crawl rates and refresh rates, except, perhaps ASK which continues to have terrible refresh rates and basically just keeps indexing the same pages over and over ignoring new content
Need a Google sitemap
Personally I don't even put a sitemap on a website. The crutch of weak link architecture especially if it's for a SE! The only reason I'd do it is for a user but once you get over a few hundred pages a sitemap is IMO, not even much use to a user. Google sitemaps IMO, expose too much about your business to competitors.
Frequent spidering helps rankings
Only in that it gets new content found quicker.
PPC ads will help or hurt organic rankings
Only those who only see the monetization and not why people use SE's and what happens when the results suffer understand why SE's are not going to let PPC influence the quality of the results. That said, I have seen where occasionally it appears as if Google is occasionally having trouble and indexing it's own ads. Generally I notice that at times when there is a major change to the algo. For instance I saw some of this around Florida, the Big Daddy rollout, when the ad crawler started crawling regular pages not just PPC landing pages and lastly just before the release of Universal Search
Must have keywords in domain names and URLs
Not a must but... doesn't hurt. If you are a believer that SE's do contextual analysis of links then... you're probably about hitting the roof about now! I'm in that camp but understand that Jill has a different method and can do more with copy then most of us can with IA and link text.
H tags are necessary
Not a must but... doesn't hurt. For those of us who are big believers in linguistic semantics and the role of document structure in the algos we'd see this as heracy but... we all have our own "secret sauce" and therefore our lists differ.
Words in meta keyword tag need to be in content
Actually the opposite is the case. The Keywords tags were meant to help SE's, identify content themes, now it's more about slang, mispellings and associated phrases for instance amps for amplifiers. Often these words do not appear on the page so... this is how you tell the SE about them.
Copy must be a certain number of words. (LOL, Jill says she “made that up” 7 years ago (250 words) for a presentation 2001? I wrote about that in the 90's. That is a very old algo that primarily was to thwart manipulation of a ranking algo that exploited a weakness by having very short pages with high keyword density. I agree with Jill to some extent, however, I usually only consider pages for optimization that are 300 or more words. I have seen indications that the number of words (content other than what is common to every page) may influence some SE's that use copy/links ratios. I have found it easier to keep pages of that size out of the supplemental index. This may be a false indicator in that the new algos for segmenting site navigation links may be the real reason for the indicator.
Must be a specific keyword density
Keyword density was the second most over hyped technique and was in many ways responsible for the SEO filter implemented by Gooogle around the Florida update. As soon as someone says anything about KWD my eyes glass over and I begin to snooze because that is, and always has been, a stupid way to determine the amount of optimization a page needs to reach a desired position
Should optimize for 1 keyword phrase per page
Yeup, that is a technique I never understood beyond I target 1 primary phrase and several modifiers on a page.
You need to optimize for the long tail
See the above... I'd add that the work I've done on this shows it can be an effective use of my time to research the long tail but only if you're doing PPC and can use that as the basis for uncovering input and mispellings. I use Excel to build these in several match types.
Duplicate content will get your site penalized
Penalty, is a term I hate. If duplicate content goes into supplemental or as it seems now just disappears, IMO, that's a penalty. I don't give a.... I am penalized because I am getting no benefit for the content.
HTML code must validate to W3C
No one can even begin to prove that... or get any indication that there may be some validity to it. What looks like a positive due to clean code is likely more about the other habits of developers who take that much pride in their code.
Navigation must be text links not images
I remember Jill back in the day researching this and her conclusion was Google didn't trust the img alt as link text. That has been my MO but by using some table design tricks you can have your images and link text too! My first lesson will be on some of these indexing and use of HTML elements to direct indexing techniques I've developed over the years. I try not to do anything just for SE's, however, this is one of the places where the rule got fudged a bit!
Can’t use Flash
Totally agree this is a myth, SeoPros update will incorporate a lot of flash just to prove it can be done! We will likely include some silverlight as well if I have any influence in the decision. I'd like to try some dynamic charts
Google’s link: command is useful
It's about as useful as the toolbar PR;-)
Pages rank in PageRank order
hehe.. IMO, that one should only be misunderstood by a wannabe!
You must be in DMOZ and/or Yahoo directory
No... but... it doesn't hurt! SE crawler's work off a seeding usually some large directory like DMOZ or Yahoo!. There was a lot in the hilltop papper about the seed sites. A crawler must start from some list of links why not two of the web's oldest reveiewed directories.
posted @ Wednesday, June 25, 2008 5:09 AM