Following a short and interesting discussion in the pub last night I decided that I’d have a look at some of the more pervasive and widely held notions about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that I strongly believe are not true.

The first thing we need to consider when we’re thinking about SEO is what does it mean to be #1 in a search engine. The ranking your website is given is not a measure of popularity or quality. This is important to note. Your search engine placement is a measure of how relevant your website is to the search terms the a user has entered into the search engine. The art of SEO is to demonstrate to Google (or Bing, Ask, Baidu, etc) that the website in question is the one that best represents the information that the user is looking for.

Myth 1: I know how Google’s algorithm works.

Google’s PageRank algorithm, the computer program that they’ve developed over the past 13 years, is one of the most closely guarded trade secrets in the world. Arguably it’s the most important piece of software in existence today – it certainly affects the lives of close to everyone who uses the internet at the moment.

It’d be wrong to suggest noone knows anything about it. By conducting experiments on how changes to websites affect their placing in Google’s search results it’s possible to figure out some things about it. We know that keywords in page titles, headings, and URLs change the way Google perceives a website. We know that incoming links from other popular websites can make your site rank better. But after all the tests and tweaks there are always going to be things that we don’t know.

Myth 2: I can guarantee a #1 rank for your chosen keywords.

A vast number of people outside of the web industry appear to believe that with the right content, optimisations, advertising and linking it’s possible to move into the number one spot in Google for any search. Sadly it’s a myth still sold be some of the less scrupulous SEO consultants out there. It simply isn’t true. It can’t be for a number of reasons;

  • Google tweak the results for some search terms to force certain sites to the top of the listing (usually Wikipedia).
  • The age of a website is an important factor in it’s Page Rank. You can’t make Google believe a website is older than it actually is.
  • It’s a competitive market. For some popular searches there are tens of thousands of websites vying for the #1 rank. They can’t all be top.

If you choose your search terms well, and find something that your customers are likely to search for that isn’t completely saturated, then it is possible to optimise a website to rank highly.

Myth 3: Google is the answer to your business’s problems.

Placing in a search engine is an important factor in a website strategy, but you should always be aware that it is not, and will never be, the answer to all the problems facing your website. Even if you’re in that coveted first place for a raft of keywords you won’t have a successful website unless you’re meeting a number of other criteria. For that Google spot to be effective you need to make sure;

  • Your potential clients have to be internet users. It might sound obvious, but if you’re running a business that few people turn to the internet to find providers for then your top spot isn’t going to get you many extra sales.
  • Your website is effective at converting traffic to sales. All a search engine will do is send visitors to your website. If they don’t like what’s there when they arrive they’ll hit the back button and try the next search result.

Myth 4: I won’t need to change your website.

The majority of effective SEO techniques will involve changes to the way your website is presented to the internet. If your markup (the HTML code that tells browsers what to display) isn’t optimised, and if your content is unfriendly to spiders, your chosen SEO expert is going to need to recommend changes that your web development company is going to need to implement. You should be aware that this is very likely to involve an additional cost from your web developer.

Assuming your website is not optimised at all, an SEO expert should be recommending that the following may need to be looked at;

  • Page titles
  • The description META tag
  • URL structure
  • Site navigation
  • Textual page content
  • Anchor text (links)
  • Heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, and so on)
  • Image attributes
  • Your robots.txt file
  • Your sitemap.xml file

I’ll be explaining all of these terms in later blog posts.

Myth 5: You can optimise your website’s ranking on your own.

This is the biggest myth of them all. One of the key defining factors in how the web has grown and developed is the linking from one source of information to another. How does this affect you? Google really likes your website to be linked to from other websites. The thinking is that if other websites like yours enough to provide a link there must be something there worth looking at. To this end, for your website to move up the results page it’s essential that you develop relationships with other websites and persuade them to link to you. It’s usual for you to provide a link back to their website in return too; this reciprocal linking benefits both websites.

There are so many more myths about how you should optimise your website for Google that I’ll likely come back to this topic in the future.