Every day a new SEO myth is born; unfortunately, not every day does an old SEO myth die off. The net result is a growing population of myths.

These are nearly impossible to squash because the snake-oil salesmen of our industry keep perpetuating them — bringing them back from the brink, even. You can talk at conferences till your blue in the face. You can develop SEO checklists like this one, or even author a book. You’ll still get asked how to write good meta keywords.

You can even pre-empt myths before they take hold, as Matt Cutts attempted in his recent post, Google Incorporating Site Speed in Search Rankings. Despite Matt’s best efforts, I am sure this won’t be the last time we hear (or read) the myths “site speed is a major new factor in determining Google rankings” and “the site speed signal will help big sites who can pay more for hosting.”

Sometimes the myths get debunked, only to end up coming back with a vengeance. Take the meta keywords tag for instance. Google never did support this worthless tag. But apparently, Yahoo had been “supporting” the tag for some time. Remember when Yahoo went on the record (at the SMX East 2009 conference) to say they were no longer giving any credence to the meta keyword tag? Then, within days Danny Sullivan published his findings from some of his own tests. Turned out Yahoo’s assertion on the meta keywords tag was wrong. In Yahoo it apparently still is a signal (albeit an incredibly minor one.) Oops.

I, for one, hate misinformation and disinformation, and our 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. I think this is only fitting, considering Covario’s oft-stated goal is to be “the source of truth” for our clients on the performance of their SEO and SEM.

And now, without any further ado, the list…

And now, without any further ado, the list…

1. Our SEO firm is endorsed/approved by Google. The following comes from an actual email a friend of mine received from an SEO firm last year:
   

   We are…Google Approved, a partner with Google, they endorse us as an optimizer, and their list includes very few partners, and we are one of them!. To find us on their list please go to: http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/woac.html and select region: United States; scroll to the middle of the page and find National Positions.”

   Hmm…. you won’t find them listed there anymore.

2. Don’t use Google Analytics because Google will spy on you and use the information against you. This one comes straight from the conspiracy theorists. Google has made numerous assurances that they aren’t using your traffic or conversion data to profile you as a spammer.
3. Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings. If only this were true, our jobs as SEOs would be so much easier! It doesn’t take many searches with SEO for Firefox running to see that low-PageRank URLs outrank high-PR ones all the time. It would be naive to assume that the PageRank reported by the Toolbar Server is the same as what Google uses internally for their ranking algorithm.
4. Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings. I just heard this one from a fellow panelist in an SEO session at a conference I presented at within the last month (I won’t mention who, or which show.) This made me cringe, but I bit my lip rather than embarrass and contradict them in front of the audience. Should I have spoken up? Did I do the audience a disservice by leaving this myth unchallenged? I struggled with that. In any event, Google will use your sitemaps file for discovery and potentially as a canonicalization hint if you have duplicate content. It won’t give a URL any more “juice” just because you include it in your sitemaps.xml, even if you assign a high priority level to it.
5. Since the advent of personalization, there is no such thing as being ranked #1 anymore because everyone sees different results. Although it is true that Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (and now you don’t even have to be logged in to Google for this personalization to take place), the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are relatively minor. Check for yourself. Get in the habit of re-running your queries — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing how much (or how little) everything shifts around.
6. Meta tags will boost your rankings. I’m so sick of hearing about meta tags. Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete waste of time. Period. They have been so abused by spammers that the engines haven’t put any stock in them for years and years. What about other meta tags — such as meta description, meta author, and meta robots — you ask? None of the various meta tags are given any real weight in the rankings algorithm.
7. It’s good practice to include a meta robots tag specifying index, follow. This is a corollary to the myth immediately preceding. It’s totally unnecessary. The engines all assume they are allowed to index and follow unless you specify otherwise.
8. It’s helpful if your targeted keywords are tucked away in HTML comment tags and title attributes (of IMG and A HREF tags.) Since when have comment tags or title attributes been given any weight?
9. Having country-specific sites creates “duplicate content” issues in Google. Google is smart enough to present your .com.au site to Google Australia users and your .co.nz site to Google New Zealand users. Not using a ccTLD? Then set the geographic target setting in Google Webmaster Tools; that’s what it’s there for. Where’s the problem here?
10. You can keep search engines from indexing pages linked-to with Javascript links. There are many documented cases of Google following JavaScript-based links. Google engineers have stated that they are crawling JavaScript links more-and-more. Of course, don’t rely on Google parsing your JavaScript links, but don’t assume it will choke on them either.
11. Googlebot doesn’t read CSS. You’d better believe Google scans CSS for spam tactics like hidden divs.
12. You should end your URLs in .html. Since when has that made a difference?
13. You can boost the Google rankings of your home page for a targeted term by including that term in the anchor text of internal links. Testing done by SEOmoz found that the anchor text of your “Home” links is largely ignored. Use the anchor text “Home” or “San Diego real estate” — it’s of no consequence either way.
14. It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.) This is another fallacy spread by the same aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much.
15. Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings. Particularly if done on a massive scale with totally irrelevant sites, right? Umm, no. Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo directory on your site isn’t helping your users, nor is it helping your SEO.
16. Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings. Not true. Unless perhaps you’re hoarding all your PageRank by not linking out at all — in which case, that just looks unnatural. It’s the other way around, i.e. getting links to your site — that’s what makes the difference.
17. It’s considered “cloaking” — and is thus taboo and risky — to clean up the URLs in your links selectively and only for spiders. If your intentions are honorable, then you have nothing to fear. All the major search engines have said as much. You are helping the engines by removing session IDs, tracking parameters and other superfluous parameters from the URLs across your site — whether it’s done by user-agent detection, cookie detection or otherwise. After all, if it were bad, would Yahoo be doing it? Check it for yourself: visit the Yahoo.com home page with the Googlebot user agent string (e.g. with Firefox using the User Agent Switcher extension). You’ll notice the “ylt” parameter has been stripped from all the links.
18. 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.
19. The bolding of words in a Google listing signifies that they were considered in the rankings determination. Also discussed in my last column, this phenomenon — known as “KWiC” in Information Retrieval circles — is there purely for usability purposes.
20. H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO.
21. There are some unique ranking signals for Google Mobile Search, and they include the markup being “XHTML Mobile”. Google Mobile Search results mirror those of Google Web Search. By all means, create a mobile-friendly version of your site; but do it for your users, not for SEO.
22. SEO is a black art. And it’s done, usually in a dark room, by some rogue SEO consultant, without requiring the involvement of the client / rest of the company. If SEO were like that, our lives would read like spy novels.
23. The Disallow directive in robots.txt can get pages de-indexed from Google. As I explained in my article “A Deeper Look at Robots.txt“, disallows can lead to snippet-less, title-less Google listings. Not a good look. To keep pages out of the index, use the Noindex robots.txt directive or the meta robots noindex tag — NOT a Disallow directive.
24. SEO is a one-time activity you complete and are then done with. How many times have you heard someone say “We actually just finished SEOing our site”? It makes me want to scream “No!” with every fiber of my being. SEO is ongoing. Just like one’s website is never “finished,” neither is one’s SEO. Catalog marketers get this better than anyone else: they are used to optimizing every square inch of their printed catalog. There is always more performance to be wrung out. The “set it and forget it” misconception is particularly prevalent among IT workers — they tend to treat everything like a project so that they can get through assignments, close the “ticket” and move on, and thus maintain their sanity. I can’t say I blame them.
25. Automated SEO is black-hat or spammy. There is nothing wrong with or inappropriate in using automation. Indeed, it signals a level of maturity in the marketplace when industrial-strength tools and technologies for large-scale automation are available. Without automation, it would be difficult to impossible for the enterprise company to scale their SEO efforts across the mass of content they have published on the Web. Chris Smith paints a compelling picture for SEO automation in this classic post.
26. A site map isn’t for people. A good (HTML, not XML) site map is designed as much for human consumption as it is for spiders. Any time you create pages/copy/links solely for a search engine, hoping they won’t be seen by humans, you’re asking for trouble.
27. There’s no need to link to all your pages for the spiders to see them. Just list all URLs in the XML Sitemap. Orphan pages rarely rank for anything but the most esoteric of search terms. If your web page isn’t good enough for even you to want to link to it, what conclusion do you think the engines will come to about the quality and worthiness of this page to rank?
28. Google will not index pages that are only accessible by a site’s search form. This used to be the case, but Google has been able to fill out forms and crawl the results since at least 2008. Note this doesn’t give you permission to deliberately neglect your site’s accessibility to spiders, as you’d probably be disappointed with the results.
29. Placing links in 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, and/or use CSS to push the links way out to the side so they won’t detract from the homepage’s visual appearance! (I am being facetious here, don’t actually do this.)
30. Using a service that promises to register your site with “hundreds of search engines” is good for your site’s rankings. If you believe that, then you may also be aware that there is a Nigerian prince who desperately needs your help to get a large sum of money smuggled out of his country, for which you will be richly rewarded.
31. Home page PageRank on a domain means something. As in: “I have a PageRank 6 site.” In actuality it means nothing. As I already stated, toolbar PageRank is misleading at best, completely bogus at worst. Furthermore, a high PageRank on one’s home page doesn’t necessarily equate to high PageRank on internal pages. That’s a function of the site’s internal linking structure.
32. Outsourcing link building to a far-away, hourly contractor with no knowledge of your business is a good link acquisition solution. And a sound business decision… NOT! As it is, the blogosphere is already clogged enough with useless, spammy comments in broken English from third-world link builders. No need to make it worse by hiring them to “promote” your site too.
33. The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters. If this were true then those same third-world link builders would also be clicking away on search results all day long.
34. Keyword density is da bomb. Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.
35. Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO. As in: san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com. Separate keywords with hyphens in the rest of the URL after the .com, but not in the domain itself.
36. Great Content = Great Rankings. Just like great policies equals successful politicians, right?

SOURCE: searchengineland.com

Everyone wants to be wanted by Google, even the mainstream market is based on the principle and adult is no different. First of all WordPress is the most Google friendly CMS out there and with some tweaks and plugins any blog can do so much better. These details help webmasters get easily targeted traffic.
The two most sought-after words in Google are God and Sex so to nobody’s great shock adult is a winner.

Success shows just how easy it is to get traffic with one WordPress blog so why not just start hundreds of ‘em? Guess what? Many webmasters are doing just that for many years and get some really nice traffic from it. The only problem; it quickly becomes excruciating to manage hundreds of sites. You need to update the blogs regularly and posts, good content and constantly tweaking your SEO, while rather easy soon becomes a repetition that ends up taking the better part of your day. You can use plugins to posts automatically and there are loads of other methods tot make your job easier but the fact that you’re just one individual, glorious, but one will sort of limit your ability to manage hundreds of blogs. It kinda kills the enthusiasm, doesn’t it?
Having a network is all well and good for getting traffic, but you won’t be able to stretch on forever nor will you really have to.

Are blogs superior because they have bigger photos/movies or because you have a short description underneath? Nope, it’s because blogs are the new improved TGPs.
Even rookies in this industry know what a TGP is: a site rotating pictures with a gallery behind each thumbnail, a way to trade traffic with other sites based on certain productivity statistics. The big blemish with TGPs is ironically the very same gold mine that still keeps them working and yielded so many shiny nuggets in the past: its the exchanging traffic feature. When people click on pictures they enter a gamble scheme, a % gets them the pretty pictures they clicked and a % of clicks sends them to other TGP sites. This tricks our good people successfully annoying them in the process.

This is a cute game in itself but when someone wants to see a particular picture teasing them like this is counterproductive. Doing this over the many years has predictably labeled TGPs as lower credibility sites since what you see is rarely, if ever what you get. They’re still afloat now and bringing money to those who really know their business, but when the blogs and tube sites started to blossomed things suddenly changed in the eyes of our porn consumers.

Most blogs are sites based on free traffic and blog networks, therefore not obliged to send any traffic to anyone else. This gives them the distinct possibility of letting people see exactly what they want. Adding the better photos/movies and galleries to be easily browsed, without bothersome popups and tricks will guarantee visitors trust your site. Trust in turn brings bookmarks and a better conversion ratio.

So what’s better to have and to hold?
Fueling one TGP with quality traffic is expensive and a pain in the ass, you need some people willing to give you some of their bot-scam-free spotless traffic or buy it directly from traffic sites. The Blogs are more effective in that department, especially if you manage more and make a spider web of them. That should get you all the traffic you can harvest, but you’re not of the traffic hook here either; after you’ve reached your limit, you’ll need to invest in traffic to grow your blog and increase your sales.

Basically it all comes down to what type of content you have, if you have good content from sponsors with a good text describing the scenes, blogs are a much safer bet in the long-run since they can grow some steady solid roots.

As for Tubes actually being the new TGPs: nope, those would be the new MGPs. Same food, different names, nobody to give a damn: this theory applies to the MGP/Tube conflict as well.

TGPs are a slowly but surely dying breed since people everywhere want more quality free stuff and these sites can’t really give up the traffic exchange scheme. Walk down the street and notice the women clothing have lessened significantly in size and material within the last few years, it’s basically the same yummy principle of offering more free content. Of course these need to go hand in hand with the teasing and the offering of something much more valuable otherwise you’re out of business, these are essential steps in the evolution process of all things.
People are willing to pay for newer and better content and expect the old one for free so the shiny nuggets of the near future will sit snugly in the hands of he who figures out how to leverage this new way of thinking versus imposing the old method harder and harder.

Supposedly you have the content/product all wrapped up and ready to go; now you’re looking for someone to create the actual site and you find some design firm or freelancer. You describe the site you need to them and after the customary negotiation tango and money spent you get your first draft. If the draft looks good you give your approval to go ahead and finish it. Shortly your design is ready. And what if the designer didn’t really understand your business and quickly hooked you up with some eye-candy to shut your mouth?  What??

Yes, you read it right; that’s what he gets paid for, to make everything look good not create or cater for your businesses. Ouch… Than we have a big problem, namely: another pretty site will really always be just another pretty site.

Now imagine you don’t drop just a fist-full of ideas on the design company’s table; you do your homework, research the market, analyze what others are doing and try to understand them. Get the ideas on paper and start making sketches about the site and the way it should work. Get some screen-shots of other sites with similar features and mix them up. See what works best and how you can improve on that. Look for their problems, find solutions, write that down and assemble everything using a graphic program like Photoshop or, PIXLR, even Paint will do. You don’t have to make the design just play with your ideas and make some sketches.
Remember, designers are visual people not story-tellers, so make everything visual for them; the more visual the stuff you give, the better they’ll know what you need and how to do it.

Go to a design company with your project in place and see the difference. You surely picked up some design skills till now but instead of letting some designers figure out your business plan you need to have the plan in place and then show them to the canvas. Again, their job is making stuff  look good not selling products. You are the webmaster, this is your store and you know how to manage it.
At this point they could come up with suggestions to improve some things, don’t try to impose every single detail of you plan but make sure they follow the thing.
When all is said and done you should have a site to fit your business, ready and able to bring you your sales. And you improved your business and design skills since along the way.

The more design skills you have the better; you’ll need to tune some things eventually and won’t have the time to wait around for others to handle small fry at their convenience. You don’t need to be an expert on everything but as a webmaster you need to know some basic design and a bit of html, css and php coding to tweak the code if needed.  Of course don’t try to do everything yourself but knowing the basics will help you boost your business a lot.

Most of the time webmasters enjoy telling stories about their projects and basically leaving everything up to their designers. Now they aren’t paid to get you sales, and they don’t value the same things; a bucket of cold water but that’s the gist of it.

In 10 years of design I built a reputation of helping clients just because I took the time to understand their projects but this takes so much time and energy few companies can be really bothered to do it.

Take your time to do your homework and don’t just hand your business over to strangers.

First of all it largely depends on whom you ask; should you ask a programmer he will assure you that the code and functionality is the most important part, a designer would surely say the design is alpha and omega, the content creator bets everything on the content and a SEO master would say the traffic.
Basically all 4 elements are important in their own right. You can’t have a good site without any of them, but the way to mix these ingredients to brew your potion is the true difference between getting sales and wasting time.

Let’s analyze each of them and see how we can make the right mix and get the sales:

The Code

With a good Code: your site is working fine, there are no unforeseen issues, it’s easily crawled by Google and automatizes your work to save time. Basically it helps a lot. Using other scripts will make your site come to life; making it move, rotating your pictures, trading traffic with other sites, managing your members area and content, keeping track of your visitors…  and so on.

Without it: you could probably set your site as wallpaper and eyeball it…

Verdict: It’s vital to have the site working. But if you have too many scripts it still won’t be enough to improve your sales. Not to mention they might clash so you need only the best and most effective.

The Design

With a good Design: your site is one step ahead. It has the essential first impression bonus point, great usability for comfortable navigation, content displayed the best possible way to make your visitors click, buy, memorize and bookmark your site.

Without it: could be detrimental, most visitors leave immediately if they don’t think the site has what they’re looking for or isn’t serious enough to invest in appearance.

Verdict: Needed to make your people click and pay. But design alone can’t make the sale. You need all the other elements in place and then use design to bring out the site’s full potential and maximize your sales.

Content

With good Content: you have true value on your site, and if you update regularly people will start buying.

The main issue with content: it’s hard to go fresh, to find one that’s not overly used all over the web and leave your visitors amazed and breathless at first glance. But dedicating time to find the best content is not only important but vital for your sales. You will not find everything in one place so don’t expect to get it all from one sponsor but gather content from many so you can put up a collection and get visitors interested.

Without it: you have no business, so better find time to get some hot content.

Verdict: The better the content the bigger the interest it gathers and the easier the sales flow.  But having good content and presenting it poorly will yield shockingly low productivity.

Traffic

With good Traffic: you get your sales. Impress enough people and there you go. But everyone is looking for great traffic that’s hard to find. Who wouldn’t want lots of people to pay big bucks?

Instead of trying to sniff out the Traffic Fairy to give you her magic traffic (instead of keeping such treasure all for herself), it’s wiser to learn the ropes of the one you can get. Understand the traffic you have, your visitor’s target and needs and focus on giving them exactly what they want.

Without it: you have nobody on your site, and without people nobody buys. Sherlock could probably confirm that. So just start with links, SEO and buy traffic slowly, see what works and what doesn’t and cater to what does so you can grow a base to receive your sales from.

Verdict: It’s the bread and wine of your site but you don’t need a traffic nuke at the very beginning, learn to rise your productivity and gradually invest time and money for more.

Now having all these ingredients together things are becoming clear. “It’s not the product but how you can sell it”, and that’s the business you’re in.
We need the Code to move the thing, Content to fill it with, Design to bring the site to its maximum potential and Traffic, lots and lots of it.

The importance of these 4 elements depends of the level you are in.
Level one. If you just started your site, the code, design and content are the essential parts to get everything ready.
Level two. When the site is ready and running try to improve the conversion ratio with adjusting the design constantly to see what works bests and gets sales.
Level tree. When some sales start coming in search for better content and traffic.
Level four. If the site is getting bigger shovel in as much traffic as it can take.

The skills and speed you go through these levels depend exclusively upon your learning to assess your own level and invest your time and money accordingly. It comes with practice and once you get the hang of it you can’t unlearn it.