Thursday, 22 May 2008

SEO Myths & MisnomersThere are a lot of myths surrounding search engine optimization (SEO). I don’t mean to gripe about it, but I just have to set the record straight - it’s time to dispel these myths and get to the bottom of what’s really going to improve your SEO. The five myths that bug me the most pertain to Meta Tags, Keyword Density, Redirects, Duplicate Content, and Dynamic URLs. (and don’t even get me started on Alt Attributes!)

SEO Myth #1: Meta Tags don’t matter.

Even though Meta Keywords have been essentially useless for years now (yet still considered best practice to include - and there is a very real chance of running into problems if you don’t use them…) and Meta Robots are of questionable value (robots.txt is a much better choice), there are a number of extremely important Meta Tags that should still be considered, and may even become more relevant in years to come as Web taxonomy, findability and Web standards in general mature.

  • Meta Description is still required and of high importance as it is the window to the topic of every Web page via the search engine results pages (SERPs).
  • Dublin Core meta standards should be applied whenever possible; this may one day be mandated by many industries.
  • There are other Meta Tags that can be extremely helpful (such as NOODP), but that’s a topic for a whole other article.

SEO Myth #2: Keyword Density does matter.

  • Although there are no hard-set rules for how often keywords should appear on a page, you will definitely be penalized for keyword “stuffing”.
  • Repeating a specific keyword phrase in every “key” area (e.g. URL, title, headings, paragraphs, links etc….) is no longer a “best practice” and in fact might also take a hit in the SERPs depending on how obvious it is.

The best way to optimize for a keyword phrase is to include it in a few key spots (e.g. in the title and referenced in the content), but you should also incorporate content that is related to the keyword phrase (use synonyms, related terms etc.) and focus on one topic per page - the days of keyword repetition are gone.

Search algorithms are now able to determine the relevance of a page for a keyword phrase not only by the phrase itself, but by the related terms and topics that are included in other areas of your Web page or site as a whole. Areas such as headings, text surrounding links and actual anchor text are still extremely important, but you are wiser to keep your content relevant rather than repetitive. For example, surrounding a link to “widget a” with terms related to or describing “widget a” would be more effective in the current search algorithms than placing the term “widget a” all over the page.

SEO Myth #3: Redirects are bad.

Redirects are not bad and they will not destroy your position in the search engines - but using redirects incorrectly will definitely destroy your position in the search engines.

The only correct redirect is a 301 which tells the robots that the page that used to exist in one location now resides somewhere else – end of story. All “Link Juice”, authority and page rank from the old URL will be passed onto the new URL.

301’s are completed on the server side usually identified by a “.htaccess” file in Unix based systems, or absolute redirect in Internet Information Services (IIS) on Windows-based servers.

SEO Myth #4: Duplicate content is always bad.

Duplicate content can be bad - sometimes.

With the proliferation of RSS and other syndication mechanisms on the internet these days, content duplication is becoming more and more common (and less and less a function of spamming) and the search algorithms are changing as a result.

The real issues arise when you have multiple domain names pointing to one or more copies of the same site with pages and pages of exactly the same content. If you are hosting multiple sites under multiple domains with exactly the same content then you are definitely going to be penalized. On the other hand, if you only have a few articles or important pages duplicated on one or more sites you are generally going to be alright.

If you must have multiple domains, they need to be redirected appropriately to one primary domain, or even better, eliminated altogether (e.g. by using subdomains for segmenting).

SEO Myth #5: Dynamic URLs are bad.

Dynamic URLs - Web page addresses with parameters instead of or in addition to page names (e.g. www.example.com/?page=1234abc) - are still very common on many dynamic Web sites and the search algorithms do take this into account when indexing such sites.

If you use dynamic URLs, the search engine spiders can still crawl your site, however, two or three parameters are as many as a robot will tend to read. Having relevant text in the URLs will obviously be much better for the robots and your visitors, but parameter-based dynamic URLs can (and do) still perform very well in SERPs.

Bonus Gripe: Alt Attributes in Images are for Search Engines

I just want to clear up one other small item that keeps coming up and is a pet-peeve of mine. Besides people always referring to Alts in images as “Tags” (they are an attribute of a tag rather than a tag themselves), many individuals think that Alts are just for search engines and should be optimized that way. This is not the case.

Alt attributes were created to describe an image for anyone using a non-graphical interface to access a Web page. Generally speaking, Alts are for visually impaired individuals using text-readers and should always be targeted to those visitors, not the search engine spiders.

The nice side-effect of using Alts this way is that they generally allow the image to work much better in Universal Search type applications (read: image search) indirectly pushing qualified traffic to your site.