There seem to be a lot of talks about on page seo around the net on blogs as well as user communities. I hate seeing people waste there time so today I am going to reveal a few myths about on page seo that you should take to heart. If you don’t want to read this whole post skip to the last part as it tells you why this is so important. You can then decide whether to go back and read the rest of the post for yourself.

Meta Tags – One of the biggest myths floating around the net is the thought that unless you have good keyword rich meta tags you won’t obtain a good ranking. While that may have been true in the past it no longer matters to the search engines. The only tag that matters to the engines at this point is the title tag of which I have written multiple articles on in the past.

Heading Tags, Bolds, Italics and Sizes – A big myth around the net is the fact that you have to use heading tags, bolds, italics and even different sized text to get the search engines attention for what keyword you want to rank for. This is also a myth and is not necessary at all, if you create your content for your visitors the search engines will be more then happy to rank you properly as long as your title tag is setup right.

Alt Tags – I can’t believe this is still a myth around the net but that just goes to show how good google is at lying to all of us. They have said that the Alt Tag helps them know what images / your page is about so they can rank you better. This of course is all a bunch of junk that you can ignore, google is trying to run you around in circles with all these techniques for seo, just ignore them friends.

Keyword Density – This myth is probably the most wide spread of them all, the engines say that if your page states your keyword blah blah % of the time you will have a better chance of ranking for your terms. This is also a lie that should be ignored, the only time keyword density even need to be looked at is when you have a blog front page so you don’t mention the same word 1,000′s of times on one page. As stated above, create your content for your readers, if you do this the engines will treat you better then you would think.

W3C / Clean HTML – Why is this in the myth list? Because friends of mine believe it and I am adamant that it is a waste of time. Sure having clean code is great and looks impressive in a portfolio but for seo it doesn’t matter the slightest little bit. In fact when you read my last statement of this post you will understand why I listed a lot of these myths as I have.

Title Tag Keyword Use – People seem to think that if they spam the title tag on a page they will get a better ranking, some also think limiting the title tag to just 1 keyword is the solution to better rankings… Guess what, in both cases each party is WRONG! It doesn’t matter how many keywords you use in the title tag, however I have found that a range between 3-5 keywords is best. It really depends how many keywords you need to go after throughout your whole site.

So why am I so intense with what is and is not a seo myth? Well think of it this way, each time you make your page more SEO friendly the search engines can begin to crawl your page better right? Not necessarily, one thing it does do is alert them that the page is more seo friendly oh and guess what the search engines don’t like people applying SEO to the web pages so why would the rank you better for it?

Its my belief that the more seo friendly your page is the worst your rankings ar going to be, unless you start the site off with decent seo. If you can somehow understand seo before you start a site it would be best as this way the search engines rank your site as if you just got things right by pure luck. This is the best plan when starting a site / doing seo to a website in my opinion but remember as I have said in the past they’re is no one way to skin a cat and my opinions are just that an opinion.

What do you think, does limiting seo on page help or hurt your potential rankings?

Filed under: Personal Posts

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