SEO, or search engine optimization, is a vital marketing strategy offered by a host of companies and agencies.SEO is used by businesses to build a successful online presence. When search engine optimization is done correctly, your business website will be highly capable of driving targeted traffic and attracting plenty of potential customers and prospects.
However, because of the need for effective SEO strategies, there is also an influx of companies offering SEO consulting services which makes choosing the right SEO consultant harder. In fact, a lot of companies offering SEO consulting services practice out-of-date SEO methods and other unscrupulous SEO methods just to make a quick buck. The problem is that reputable and competent companies offering SEO consulting services also take on a bad reputation, when in fact; these companies are highly capable of implementing effective SEO campaigns. Likewise, dubious companies offering SEO consulting services make it more difficult for competent SEO firms in convincing potential clients that search engine optimization work, which is sad since SEO can be a highly efficient method when marketing businesses.
In order to help businesses decide on the perfect company to provide them with SEO consulting services, it is vital that they become acquainted with the various SEO myths and facts and go from there.
SEO Myths and Facts
Myth 1: Automated search engine submission programs, capable of building traffic and daily website submission to search engines to get a website listed are effective.
Fact: SEO consulting firms offering SEO consulting services like this typically submit to link pages that are ‘Free for All’ (FFA), and important search engines like Google and Bing ignore these submissions. Hand submission will still garner the most favorable results. But, search engines index web pages every single day. So you don’t have to submit at all really, but you must build links on other sites so that the search engines can find yours and index it.
Myth 2: Keywords in your meta tags are capable of increasing you website’s ranking.
Fact: Meta tags ‘mattered’ before, but now don’t. You can still however include meta tags in HTML codes if you like, but they do not offer an advantage since they presently do not have search engine ranking value.
Myth 3: Page generators that are keyword-based are important in order to obtain a top position.
Fact: If a company offering professional SEO consulting services offers this then stay away. These page generators, creating doorway pages, are a nuisance at best and don’t provide a top listing capable of lasting for a long time.
Myth 4: All your web pages should be search engine optimized for best results.
Fact: Any company offering effective SEO consulting services will tell you that focusing on specific web pages to get your point across, in terms of your business goals, audience, and business model is what works. To illustrate, do you think that your site’s privacy policy page, contact page, terms and conditions page, or affiliate sign-up web page need to be listed by the search engines?
Web pages are independently evaluated by search engines. This means that your focus should be to optimize specific web pages to aid you in achieving your business goals.
Myth 5: IP delivery and cloaking are not spam.
Fact: The fact is that majority of search engines, especially the major ones, consider these as spam. This can lead to delisting, or worse, domain blacklisting. Competent SEO consultants may sometimes use these methods for something else, if they do, and not mainly for SEO purposes.
Myth 6: Linking your web page to quality web sites and sites with high traffic will greatly help with your page rank.
Fact: Linking your web page will help THEIR page rank, and not your page rank. Linking to highly trusted and authority web sites will however help build your credibility and online presence, and won’t negatively affect your SE ranking, but that’s about it.
Myth 7: Plenty of internal links in your web site is key.
Fact: While it is true that internal links are excellent tools for SEO, companies offering great SEO consulting services will tell you that linking is also an art in itself. What is more important in terms of page ranking is the placement of keywords in your anchor text. Likewise, you’ll need to map out which web pages you need to focus on and where to accurately place the internal links on.
Myth 8: Google Page Rank greatly helps with your site’s keyword ranking.
Fact: The Google Page Rank tool was developed so that people will be able to determine the popularity of a web page according to its backlinks. It is not related in any way to how your site will rank better with keyword searches. PR ranks are great for determining if a web site is trustworthy and for what the crawl requency is of pages. Pages with higher Page Rank are supposed to get crawled more frequently.
Myth 9: AdSense and Adwords are necessary for page ranking, especially with Google.
Fact: AdSense and Adwords are not capable of increasing your page ranking because they are not associated with organic ranking. You can make more money with AdSense if your site is ranking and drawing in lots of traffic. However, they are not built to affect organic SE rankings.
Now that you have some idea about the myths and facts surrounding search engine optimization, you can be more confident when looking for companies that offer SEO consulting services. Just stick with the SEO facts and avoid companies that offer services based on the SEO myths above.
