Meta Tags

The Myth:

Meta tags are really important to helping me rank.

The Truth:

Once upon a time, meta tags were an important part of Search Engine optimisation. While they serve an important purpose in modern SEO, the role of the meta tag has evolved. Let’s make this very clear. Meta tags are no longer a ranking factor. We would generally advise our clients to not use the meta keywords tag specifically. The keywords tag ads no value and is not seen by the end user unless they view the page source. If a competitor does this, they can gain an insight into your marketing efforts.

The title tag and the meta description tag are examples of meta tags which are still useful for quality SEO. Good meta and title tags are informative and can encourage the a user to click and visit your site. When writing them you should write them with the user in mind, not the Search engine, and they should describe the whole page, not just a specific keyword you wish to optimise for.

Keyword Stuffing

The Myth:

I need my keyword to appear multiple times in my page, in content, h tags ect.

The Truth:

Where do we even start with this topic? In the old days search engines used keywords as a major ranking factor. People caught onto this and abused it horrendously. Common methods included writing content to stuff the keyword in at every opportunity. Some savvy SEOs even filled the background with keywords of the same colour. This hides them from the user but the search engine can still see them. Search engines worked out what was going on pretty quickly and put an end to this.

In modern times keyword stuffing has lost its punch for other reasons. Firstly, Panda happened. Panda is an algorithm which aims to weed out thin content. So content which has an unnatural number of keywords stuffed into it is picked up by Panda fairly easily.

Secondly, Google is becoming much better at semantic indexing. What this means is that Google organises information and meaning into categories. By doing this Google can infer meaning and intent from a search.

Take these two keywords. “beverages” and “drinks”. To a human, it is pretty easy to see that these are two keywords have the same intent. In the old days, a search engine would have real problems understanding that these searches had the same intent. That was until recently. Now that Google can understand meaning through semantic indexing, exact keywords within content is not as important.

Search Engine Submission

The Myth:

If you submit your site directly to the search engine you can rank higher.

The Truth:

Okay, so this one doesn’t come up that often as it has been well and truly debunked, but every now and then I hear someone bring it up. Search Engine Submission is a bit of a throwback to the old days of search. Originally, people used to submit sites to search engines through submission forms. Here is an example of a submission page that still exists.

Unfortunately, this process didn’t scale very well, the submissions were often spam, so the practice eventually gave way to purely crawl-based engines. Since 2001, not only has search engine submission not been required, but has become virtually useless.

Each search engine has a suite of webmaster tools. Here you can define XML sitemaps for the crawlers the regularly to find. In Google Webmaster Tools, you can fetch pages as Google, submit them to index and render the HTML to speed the whole process. This renders site submission forms irrelevant.

Paid Ads

The Myth:

Spending money on paid ads will improve my rankings

The Truth:

This is just not true. There are a few conspiracy theories which assert that Google rewards some sites who spend a lot on paid search with higher organic rankings. The truth is, Google and other search engines go through a lot of effort to intentionally separate these aspects of their companies. Communication walls are erected to prevent any information passing through. A client that spends millions on Adwords will receive no preferential treatment from staff involved in organic search.

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