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I came across an interesting post at cre8asiteforums.com that opens the doors to discussion on some popular SEO myths.  Some are myths while in my opinion some are more fact than fiction.

In this article I look at a few of the “myths” to give you my take on these issues.  You may be surprised to learn that they aren’t all myths after all.

Let’s get right into it:

SEO copywriting means writing strong copy, then inserting keywords within the copy a number of times

I agree that this is a myth.  Because what is said here is that copywriting is the same as optimizing page content which isn’t the case.

A properly copy written page considers the keywords, but it isn’t written and then rewritten to insert words.  Ideally if you are an SEO copywriter you are taking into account the words and either writing around them (if that’s your intention) are writing to support the words as themes on the page, using synonyms and other like terms.

keyword density is important, and you don’t want too much or too little.

I don’t necessarily agree that this is a myth.  While it is true that the perfectly optimized web page used to have to fall within a specified keyword density threshold, that isn’t necessarily the case.

That being said, the total number of words on the page in relation to your keywords is important.  In my experience longer pages do tend to need more keyword occurrences to rank competitively.  That, or longer pages need to be split into multiple smaller pages.

So while keyword density doesn’t have the weight it used to it is still important.

You should place content above menus to have it “crawled first”

This isn’t a myth.  I’ve used this on sites in extremely competitive markets and it’s made a huge difference.

By placing the content higher up in the HTML code you are giving it more importance. Using tables or CSS can help accomplish this.  And in the cases where it’s been done it’s made a big difference.

Granted I haven’t actually studied the effects of this, nor tried a test to see how much of an affect such coding techniques have, but in my limited study (that is, the sites that have used this technique) it does seem to make a substantial difference.

Meta tags are the key to high rankings

While not the only part to rankings, meta tags do influence rankings.  Therefore while this statement is a myth, it does have its roots in fact.

Also, meta tags help encourage clicks, so if you are ranking competitively, the difference between someone clicking on your site versus that of a competitor could come down to how compelling your title and description are.

The revisit meta tag can tell search engines to come back on a regular basis

Total myth.  While this does help with some engines, most don’t consider it.

<META name="robots” Content="Index, Follow"> is important

This may not necessarily be a myth.  While this tag can be used to control spider activity it isn’t necessarily important.

I say this because spiders will obey the tag.  Therefore if there is content you don’t want indexed you can use this tag to exclude it.  Therefore while the tag may not be important in the grand scheme of things, it could be important to you.  Therefore it may be myth or fact, depending on your need of it.

The more links the better

I’m not so sure this is a myth.  I recently wrote an article about how George Bush’s Presidential bio page ranks highly for miserable failure.  And I highly doubt that it ranks as such because of all the relevant related incoming links.

In fact I know its because of sheer volume.  The same can be said for when you search for “click here.” Adobe is ranked number one because everyone that has PDFs on their website says to click here to get the adobe reader.

That being said, you do have to be careful with how many links you build.  Growing links too quickly will cause problems.  However, since you can’t control who links to you, you also can’t really control how quickly they grow.

For example, some of the articles on this site get hundreds of links per month while others get perhaps one or two.  Also, some get lots of links in the first month, but then trickle down as the topic becomes dated.  You can’t tell me that Google automatically penalizes you for this type of link growth.

Pagerank is dead

A definite myth.  Google has built its reputation and business on PageRank. 

I also previously wrote an article on this topic.  While PageRank may be devalued somewhat, that doesn’t mean it’s dead.

The way I look at it is that Google’s index results from a series of algorithms.  The algorithms have an order they run in.  It used to be that PageRank was applied at or near the end of this batch of algos.  Now I think it happens earlier on.  The PageRank algo is applied and then other algos are applied on the resultant set.

There is a duplicate content penalty

I agree this is a myth.  If it weren’t then Google would be penalizing itself along with dozens of other news sources for re-displaying news and press releases from around the world.

Also, it would take some extremely complex mathematics and horsepower to analyze every single page in the index and compare it to every other page.

Sure they have tons of Phd’s in their offices, but can Google realistically compare my brand new page to one that’s been around for 10 years?  How would it even know how to?

That’s not to say that they can’t do it, but my bet is they don’t do it very often.

Further, what would it take for me to avoid such a penalty?  I could merely change the word order or sentence order on a page enough that it wouldn’t appear duplicate.  So how would they catch that?

There is a certain percentage of duplication that you can get away with before your page will be filtered in the results

I guess this goes inline with the above myth.  Again, how would Google mathematically calculate that page “A” is x% similar to page “B”?

While I do think they are able to compare exact pages from similar sites (i.e. Comparing two SEO sites especially if there are red flags like the same page name and folder structure) but it gets very difficult to compare sites that are not alike (for example, one that uses top image navigation and flash versus one that is text only that uses text navigation).  Granted they could do some block level analysis but that’s still making an assumption that the text appears in roughly the same place on both pages.

Tomorrow, I will look at the remaining myths and give you my impressions.