There are so many people claiming to be experts at SEO out there you simply do not know what to believe, people are stating how to easily rank on Google and pull in hundreds or thousands of search visitors everyday. The truth is there are hundreds of factors that go into thorough search engine optimisation and there are probably around twenty that can really be measured and implemented successfully.
On the other hand you cannot help but read about ranking factors that simply do not sound right and it’s these SEO myths I would like to talk about today. You see search engine optimisation is a little mystical but only because people come up with nonsense theories that confuse those trying to learn solid SEO, these are a few of the main myths I personally come across.
Do you use webmaster tools? Has your site been verified? If not your going to suffer in Google’s rankings apparently, what do you think? If your think yes this sounds true, hold on. This is probably one of the biggest ranking myths around, I have optimised hundreds of sites, some with webmaster tools, others without and it has not made a bit of difference to the campaign.
The one that really bugs me is HTML validation to W3C standards, yes it is good practice to keep your pages as clean as possible to ensure Google.bot can find all that juicy content, but will it effect how high you rank in Google? Not likely, even Blogger a Google owned blog platform cannot even be bothered to validate their templates, why? Because it really does not matter, as long as Google can follow links to find your content there really isn’t an issue.
Some people have tried to state that spelling and grammar may be used as quality signal in Google’s algorithm, again I have seen zero evidence of this, although do admit it may be something Google look at as they tighten their algorithm but it certainly holds no weight at the minute, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to rank a site for a common misspelling.
Lastly there has been talk that the number of domain queries to your site may indicate popularity signals, however the problem with this theory is that it is too easy to manipulate it. I think domain queries no matter how diverse has little impact on where your site actually ranks. If you have been worrying about the above myths in the past, now is the time to stop and focus on the more crucial aspects of search engine optimisation.
