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There are numerous myths circulating about SEO – some of which have come into being from a general lack of knowledge around the topic, some of which are outdated, and all of which we intend to clarify in this entry. We’ll begin with…

  1. Keyword metatags

This tag used to be used years ago as a useful tool where search engines would look at the words you have in the keyword title tag to help determine what your site is about. Keywords would be relatable to each page and this would help each page of your website to rank. It now has zero value – for example here at Grapevine we have helped rank many of our clients to number one for some saturated keywords with a blank keyword title tag.

 

  1. Keyword density

This was brought in a few years ago where search engines would be looking for a density of keywords and phrases between 3% – 12% in total count against the text content. For example if a page contains 200 words, it would be looking for between 3% – 12% of that to contain your chosen key words and phrases. There was a percentage for your number one key phrase, a number for two key phrases such as ‘marketing company’, and a number for ‘outsourced marketing company’. Obviously the more words there were, the less density there was, so that would be at the lower 3% density for the term ‘outsourced marketing company’. You could get terms such as these up to 8% – 9% density on the page and rank very well. However, around 18 months ago search engines stopped looking for keyword density, but it still needs to know what your site is about. Nowadays, around 2.5% keyword density is appropriate, whereas the sites that were around 9% now suffer.

 

  1. Key Words and Phrases

Years ago, using keywords and phrases in important areas of websites such as title description and headings would have helped you rank. For example if you used the phrase ‘outsourced marketing company’ in heading 1, it would help you rank highly. Search engines now frown upon this. You now have to mix it up by still having key phrases in your titles, but not every title. Our advice would be to have a long phrase in heading 1, such as ‘look at perfect results from an outsourced marketing company’ rather than just ‘outsourced marketing company’. Heading 2 would have a key phrase, then heading 3 would have a part of the key phrase.

 

  1. Anchor Text

Anchor text is text that links to pages on external websites. Years ago we used to rank highly by heavily using anchor text, for example we ranked very highly for ‘marketing company’ when building inbound links using this phrase. Internal pages linked the phrase ‘marketing company’ back to the home page which also helped us rank highly. Search engines now frown upon this and requires that linking structures are natural. We now see some sites ranking that haven’t been optimised because they’ve been naturally written by users. In November last year, the term ‘marketing company’ had a new set of competitors on the front page of search engines, whereas before the results would be very predictable with Grapevine holding our position as number 1 or 2. These changes with search engines have brought around a mix of people, from good SEO companies who know what they’re doing, to people who don’t do SEO but have a strong link profile and a good HTML domain.

 

  1. Buying Search Engine Friendly Domains

Years ago, search engines found that domains such as ‘marketing-company.com’ were being bought and ranked highly overnight. Now, search engines have more sophisticated algorithms which combat this by taking into consideration aspects such as domain age and ethically-built links which have developed over time.

 

Search engines will no doubt continue to change their rules as they have done over many years, however the overall persuasion is for natural sites with regularly updated content – and consequently much harder work.