SEO Myths, Misnomers, and Mistakes Part 1

Meaningful Information About SEO Myths, Misnomers, and Mistakes

Today +Best Bloggers Cafe (BBC) sort out some facts from fiction and want to discuss some of the mistakes and myths that people have when it comes to On-Page and On-Side Optimization as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an important role to improve Search Engine visibility and boost revenue. Here are some of the most common SEO myths.

1. Meta Keywords:

First lets discuss Meta Keywords, just about any blog post on optimization starts right here and it is helpful to know that meta keywords are dead and should not be used. Meta keywords are found in the meta data of the header and in times past we put there to help Search Engines to discover what the site is all about. However these days the search engines do quite well to determining the topic of a website without meta keywords.

Checkout Google’s Official Statement about not using the keyword meta tag in there Search Index

http://ucut.it/38rn7c

Unfortunately you will see that many sites these days still use meta keywords, they don’t help! and rumor has it that been uses them to determine weather your site is spam. So, best practise is to avoid them. One area where meta data does matter is the Meta Description, this is the information that appears in search results as the snippet description of the website. So, its definitely important to use it correctly. You should now that Google only shows 155 characters in the results and Bing shows 165 characters.

2. Duplicate Title Tags:

As smartest search engines are they are still simply machines. Sometimes search bots have difficulty to deciding what keywords best matches your page. So, to overcome this they crawl through every thing looking for more clues. They look for additional clues like HTML tags of pages, Meta Description or anything that would help. However if the two pages have the same clue such as a duplicate title or duplicate meta description. They really are much clue for the search bot. For this reason search engine consider duplicate title tag and meta description as bad forms and can actually penalise the page.Well creating unique  title tags keep in mind that currently Google allows 62 character and bing allows 57 characters for the title. and just like meta description if its too long it will get truncated. I personally found shorter title has higher click through rate in search results.

3. Keyword in Title Tag:

Lets, discuss another common mistake websites make. In our fairness having keyword in your page title tag recently become a problem. Many people not realise that adding keyword in title tag can actually hurt them in search engines. Early in 2012 google create a penalty they termed Penguin. Actually Penguin heavily focused on over optimized websites for search engines. So websites that had their keywords in title tag, url, meta description and content often got caught by penguin. That was actually direct departure from traditional SEO. Intrusting enough this penalty is heavily weighted against title tag. For example we search “Developer Traing” on google .As you can see the screen shot below the keyword “Developer Training” is not found in any of the results title tag or meta descriptions, there is fragments of the Keyword but not the exact match.

Best Practices with Title Tag and Meta Description:

So for best practices with your Title Tag and Meta Description is to:

• Use variation of your keywords in Title and Description
• Don’t use exact keyword  either in Title or Description
• Create Title and Descriptions for humans not for bots
• Use short and to the pont Title Tag.

3. Bolding Keywords:

Bolding Keywords is another misnomers i just want die. There are still many people who believe that if we use Html tag over the tag Google will give slight edge to our optimization. Well its not true here is an video from Google,s Matt Cutts who explaining that Google has nothing to do with Bold or Strong tags.

4. Using Keywords in H1 Tag:

The final SEO myth for today is about using your main keywords in tag. This practise is no longer works.”Rand Fishkin” the owner of SEOMOZ did an in depth research that found the keywords in tag no longer worked. Here is the link you can check.

 http://ucut.it/p59rrk

I recommend you to use tag only for better user experience but not for SEO. These are some of the top myths, misnomers and mistake that are around to optimizing the guts of a website. Obviously there are many more we will discuss in the next parts of this series. You may share your views in the Comment Box. Stay Tuned