1. SEO Myths… And Why You Should Avoid Them!

2. Why SEO Myths? Every year small and medium sized businesses spend thousands of dollars on SEO firms that promise higher search engine rankings. Yet for all the money that is spent, how can you know if your company is getting its money’s worth? Don’t you wish there were some red flags to help steer you clear of SEO charlatans? Well, there are some red flags and we have collected them here for your viewing pleasure. In this presentation are 10 SEO myths that you should avoid like the plague.

3. Myth # 1 - An SEO company can guarantee a particular ranking Fact: When a company guarantees a ranking, run the other way fast. There is no silver bullet that will propel any site to the top of search engine rankings. Google claims over 200 factors that are involved in determining rank. It is impossible to even know what these 200 factors are much less be able to take them all into account.

4. Myth # 2 - Search engine rankings are a good measure of success. Fact: Beyond the top 10 results (1 st page), page ranking doesn’t mean much. Rankings are not the ultimate metric anyway. They are just a means to the real end: conversions.

5. Myth # 3 – An SEO company can manufacture or buy links for your site in order to get a higher ranking. Fact: The kind of linking that Google and other search engines reward is organic. Buying links may actually backfire on you just like it did with J.C. Penney

6. Myth # 4 - Your copy needs to be at least x words in length to rank well. Fact: A page can rank well regardless of its length. The key is quality, not quantity. Ultimately content needs to be written for the human reader not a search engine bot.

7. Myth # 5 - Buying PPC ads will increase your rankings. Fact: A paid ad campaign will never affect your organic SEO efforts .

8. Myth # 6 - The H1 tag is crucial for SEO Fact: Research shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. H1 tags should be used to improve the readability of a page - not as a place to cram in keywords.

9. Myth # 7 - Meta tags (especially the meta keywords tag) are highly important for SEO Fact: Search engines (Yahoo included) completely ignore the keywords tag, and only assign marginal importance to the description tag.

10. Myth # 8 - Keyword density is a crucial aspect of determining your search engine rankings. Fact: Keyword density plays only a small role, if any, in determining your ranking. Keyword density is, in fact, a very poor way of measuring a page’s relevance to a particular search query, and is far too easy to manipulate for search engines to take it seriously. Don’t trust an SEO firm that overemphasizes keyword density.

11. Myth # 9 - Copying your high-ranking competitors will assure you a similarly high ranking. Fact: While it is often useful to do a competitive analysis for SEO, you should never build a strategy on such a narrow methodology that doesn’t even reflect best practices.

12. Myth # 10 - Google PageRank is a crucial aspect of determining your search engine rankings. Fact: While PageRank score may have been an important factor when Google was first founded, it no longer correlates to higher rankings today. Any SEO firm that puts heavy emphasis on PageRank should be considered suspect.

13. If this slideshow has you seeing red flags about your current SEO strategy then contact us and let us show you the power of internet marketing done right. iMi Associates 919-900-8130 x 2226 services.imiassociates.com