SEO For Dummies

Chapter 22

Ten-Plus Myths and Mistakes

In This Chapter

Understanding common mistakes made by site developers

Deconstructing harmful myths

Knowing the problems that hurt your search engine rank

A lot of confusion exists in the search engine world — a lot of myths and a lot of mistakes. In this chapter, I quickly run through a few of the ideas and omissions that can hurt your search engine positions.

Myth: It’s All about Meta Tags and Submissions

This is the most pervasive and harmful myth of all, held by many Web designers and developers. All you need, many believe, is to code your pages with the right meta tags — KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION, and things like REVISIT-AFTER and CLASSIFICATION — and then submit your site to the search engines. I know Web designers who tell their clients that they’ll “handle” search engine optimization and then follow nothing more than this procedure.

It’s completely wrong for various reasons. Most meta tags aren’t particularly important (see Chapter 7), if they’re even used by search engines at all. Without keywords in the page content, search engines won’t index what you need them to index. (See Chapter 7.) Submitting to search engines doesn’t mean they’ll ...