I could summarize the above statement in one word: cheap! If you can't afford to redesign, say so. Don't say it's not necessary. Sometimes a site is just not search engine friendly; for example, you build an AJAX-powered site, and then call an SEO expert who tells you to move the text away from the AJAX windows. If you tell him that "that's not necessary" you just made his job a lot harder. This said, content must be relevant; if you are optimizing for the right key words your key words appear more important when emboldened and in headers than when all over the place. Avoid key word stuffing and spamming, you will get penalized. Myth Three: You Never Need to Redesign Your Site Spamming works; if the numbers don't add up, then spammers would stop spamming and try something else. If your website gets high rankings because of your link network, and not because you offer relevant content, then I call you a spammer (a link spammer perhaps), but if I write an article and get a piece of software to send it to a hundred directories, you call me a spammer. If I have an opt in database, and send emails to all of them using an automated system, Microsoft and yahoo would call me a spammer if they had their way.Or it can be used to attack competitors, dragging down a rival’s site. It’s enough to make many white hat SEOs and site owners furious. Myth Two: Key Word Density is Everything The idea that any one thing is everything is probably the most dangerous concept. Google's PageRank algorithm has over 200 factors it considers and MSN's Ranknet considers over 600 factors. Onsite factors on their own are just a start to SEO; off page factors are also important. So who is a spammer? Or is spam just a bad word because it sounds like it? Google compliant Black hats Most real "Black hat" practitioners are Google compliant, and will never be banned by Google. They operate by putting links back to their sites in comments, and posting these comments in high-ranking blogs worldwide. Lots of people are active Black hat practitioners, making loads of money for Google and driving traffic to Adsense campaigns. This is because Black hat SEOs seem to be the only SEOs who explore every possible way to optimize for search engines, due to their " by any means necessary" motto. Combining these with the traditional techniques of SEO (keyword density, use of meta tags and flat website design), they bring mediocre sites with low content to top ranking positions. I personally dislike purely sales sites with no content. So can I call them spammers? About Meta tags -- please DO write relevant keyword and description Meta tags into your code. It gives spiders something to cache in the database. Without them, you will be left with no description when listed in the search engines. If your key word Meta tags are irrelevant to your content you may get penalized. The search engines do not place any sort of premium on Meta tags for ranking; I have seen and ranked sites with absolutely NO META tags. This said, please add Meta tags, they make your site look neater in the SERPs. The search engines discovered that their SERPs are fallible, and in an effort to play God, they say "unethical practices," and end up giving SEO practitioners a bad name. The search engines need the adepts of Black hat SEO techniques, since this will be the only way they can work on their ranking strategies and eventually give the users a search experience which is rewarding and fulfilling "Knowing yourself, and not knowing the enemy, one defeat for each victory, knowing yourself and the enemy, in a hundred battles no fear of defeat." On Site Optimization Myths Myth One: Just Put Up Meta Tags to Get Your Ranking I didn't want to put this one here at first because everybody else mentioned this in their articles, so I thought that it was an open secret. Then I met a businessman who optimizes his blog via writing key word meta tags and doesn't do much else as far as SEO. I told him to "try and read a bit more about SEO," then I cleaned up his tags for free and offered to help with linking (for a fee). 28.The SEO Analysis: What it is and Why You Need it One of the very first things we do when we start working with a client on a search engine optimization project is perform a head to toe site analysis. In fact, more often than not, we won’t actually even quote a price for SEO unless we’ve already done an analysis. Now, let us elaborate these technique one by one - 1) META Tags – these are the tags used to define website title, description and keywords to search engine spiders or crawlers for fast indexing in search engines which can be appear in organic listing on searching any keywords or key phrase for a website. Meta tags are basically used to show your keywords and phrases to the search engines and to online visitors that what services you are offering. Search Engine Optimization Can Be Done By Anybody Now the fact is you can optimize your site yourself, and it's not very hard, depending on your key words and competition, but hopefully with this article you won't be presumptuous in your efforts to get that top ranking for your site. Yes, "anybody" can do SEO; interestingly enough, stay-at-home moms seem ideally suited for the work since they have time and write great copy. Like everything else in life, however, it's not as easy as the pros make it look. The reasons for that are three-fold. First, every single website is different. Second, we have no idea what we're dealing with just by glancing at a site. Lastly, and most importantly, we spend a large amount of time performing the analysis because it's such an important part of putting together a plan for a site's SEO project. I addressed this question first because it is the foundation of all SEO myths. It comes from the idea that "SEO is easy, just submit your site to so and so directory and so and so search engine and you are on a roll." Do-it-yourself SEO gets its processes crossed. We will come back to common myths that exist about SEO professionals (although some have been discussed in previous articles on SEO professionals). While this might appear at first to be not a particularly earth-shattering revelation, it surprises me how many so-called SEOs don't actually do an initial site analysis. Another thing that gets me shaking my head is the standard single page of statistics that many SEO firms consider to be an analysis. In this article, I'm going to share with you a couple of secrets to finding out what may really be going on with your website that we always look at during the course of an SEO analysis. But first, I want to show you a few so-called SEO analyses that quite frankly have me hopping mad. What Does SEO Really Do? Now I don't intend to answer the question in detail, but some people do wonder what hocus pocus an SEO professional does when he claims to be optimizing the site, and when they post this question, some "pseudo experts" spring up and say "nothing much, they just add tags and get a bunch of links and take your entire advertising budget." Some SEO professionals don't help because they get mysterious and go cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing. That's pretty absurd when everybody over here at SEO Chat is willing to blab SEO state secrets. Obviously some people think if you tell the client what you do, they would do it themselves. I sometimes wish it was that easy. I am a firm believer in looking at the entire SEO picture. There is no magic formula to optimizing a website for search engines; no secret formula to that winning combination. There are, however, a few foundational aspects of good, basic SEO. One of those is the analysis. Redirect example and conclusion Here is a quick example to illustrate how quickly this task can be performed. When you get the bulk of your traffic through non-search sites, there’s less chance the bully’s tactics can hurt you.” It’s not fun when your site starts dropping in the SERPs, especially if you’ve checked everything pertaining to your site and you’re absolutely certain it isn’t your fault. I hope I’ve given you some ideas as to what you can do about it.All skilled web designers should have a solid grasp of CSS and should be putting all the main formatting into this file(s). Way too often we're getting sites with dozens of font tags, color tags, size tags, etc. etc. etc. This article deals with "myths," "fallacies" and "pseudo experts" on search engine optimization professionals and search engines themselves. First I will address the popular sentiment that "search engine optimization can be done by anybody," then I will look at varying myths that exist about search engine optimization. You will be surprised at what people believe about SEO to this day. But first, let's get the heavy stuff out of the way before we start talking about the common myths.
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