There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.

Here is an example: Let's assume you make a change to your website content. Maybe after a few days you notice that your Google ranking for a certain keyword has altered. Now, it would be natural for you to assume that your content change had led to change in ranking. However, it may not be true. Your ranking could have changed due to several reasons, and may have absolutely nothing to do with the changes made to the content.

Of course, this action of mixing up the cause and effect is a common error on the part of new SEOs. Well, if it were limited to just their work, I wouldn't really mind it. But these guys are clueless and many a times spread their ignorance to other newbies on blogs and forums and create a ripple effect of newer myths. Here, I am making an attempt to discuss and clear the top 10 organic SEO myths:

Organic SEO Myth 1: You must submit your website URL to search engines. Once upon a time, this could have been the "in" thing. But since the past 5-6 years it has become unnecessary.

Organic SEO Myth 2: In order to get better ranking, you absolutely need a Google Sitemap. It's partially correct. However, if you have built your site properly (ensured its crawler-friendly) you don't require a Google Sitemap. That being said, having one won't hurt you and you can even use other Webmaster Central tools offered by Google, but this doesn't guarantee higher ranking.

Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website rankings. Only update your website content if it is necessary and not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that haven't been updated in years!

Organic SEO Myth 4: PPC (pay per click) ads can help or hurt rankings. What amuses me most is that many people believe that participating in Google AdWords campaigns will hurt their organic SEO ranking, while many others believe that PPC will spike the traffic and up the ranking. All I can say is that neither of this is true!

Organic SEO Myth 5: Not following guidelines on Google will ban your website. Google's guidelines are common sense but not mandatory. It's advisable to read them, however just don't do anything purely for search engines and you'll be fine.

Organic SEO Myth 6: Buying links can lead to banning of your website. It is partially true again. Google doesn't like to count paid links as votes for a website page. Mostly Google is unable to find out if the links are paid for, but even if it does, it won't count the links. Google won't ban your website in any case. A quick update - Google has made it easier to report paid links in sites that are unrelated to your site. Though the reasoning is yet unclear and best practice should tell you don't buy links in unrelated sites to your theme.

Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google positioning without H1 but they certainly don't hurt so use H tags correctly.

Organic SEO Myth 8: Meta keywords tag need to be used on your page. The fact is that a Meta keyword tag was introduced to use keywords that are NOT on the site page already! However, this tag is ignored by Google in any case.

Organic SEO Myth 9: The SEO copy should be 250 words in length. 250 words is not really an optimal number nor is it specific for SEO rankings. Easily, 250 words allows one to write good marketing copy and can be optimized for 3-5 main key phrases. However, shorter SEO copy works just as well.

Organic SEO Myth 10: Your pages should be optimized for the long tail keywords. This is not true. Nowadays, long-tail keyword phrases are no longer effective as not many pages use them and not many people search using long tails. You can include these keywords in blogs or even an article, but that is not really optimization.

Remember don't go spreading any SEO myths that you believe may be true. Test it yourself several times on different websites before reaching any conclusion as there are other factors involved as well.

(Source: seo-news.com/)

If you have a local website for a business operating in a specific geographic area, you don’t need a global SEO program.

A local website is one that has no need to target visitors from around the world. For instance, if you run a spa, a hotel, a real estate agency, a bed and breakfast, a caterer or restaurant, a landscaping or contractor business, automotive repair, any type of retail store or local business service, your SEO plan needs to target specifically local searchers.

A global business might seek rankings for “luxury hotels”. Your local establishment might need search engine optimization for “Chicago hotel”. There is a big difference in the amount of competition between the two search terms, therefore also in the amount of SEO effort and in the amount of cost for you.

We offer search engine optimization for both global and local websites, but our approach is in most cases quite different. Whereas a 12-month SEO program is typically recommended for a global-oriented website, a local business searching for local customers more typically requires just a six-month SEO program. We prefer not to oversell what you are not likely to need.

There are exceptions to the six-month local SEO recommendation. One such exception is for real estate agency websites, where search engine rankings are more competitive than for most local businesses six months is never enough.

Search engine Optimization, SEO, is one of the vital aspects of any website, but it is often overlooked or neglected. A website may look beautiful, the systems may be flawless, but with no visitors, it is a waste. SEO is the process of getting visitors, traffic and ultimately business to your website, primarily through achieving high rankings for your web site on search terms with high volume.

Studies have shown that Internet searchers are a notoriously impatient bunch. Almost 82% of all searchers do not go beyond the first 30 results. More than 60% don't go beyond the first 10 results. If your website is not in the top ten, you are missing out on over 60% of your potential clients. This can prove to be a very costly exercise. Even if you are happy with the traffic you get to your website, and let's say it's 40%. You can get an extra one and a half times that quantity of visitors and business or more as the result of an effective SEO campaign.

There is always advertising available as an option, but that is substantially less effective and more costly. On Google, 70% of searchers prefer the natural results to advertisements. Say the term your site is optimised for has 100 searches a day, and you are in position 12. You'll only get 40% of your potential visitors. If you're in position 21, you'll get about 25%. Position 31 and you'll get less than 19%. If you are number 1, you'll get 100 of them. If you buy an advertisement, you'll get 30% and you pay for each visitor. The moment you stop paying, you stop getting visitors. An SEO campaign on the other hand lasts for years. Once you are at the top, it takes a lot to move you down the results. As such, SEO is the most cost-effective and efficient method of marketing your website.

You also need your site to rank well for the correct keyword or search phrase. One of my favourite examples comes from research I have conducted into the job industry as part of an SEO campaign. The term a search jobs has 21 searches a day. The term job search has over 6000. Number 1 for a search jobs will give you 21 visitors. Number 1 for a job search  though will give you 6000. Choosing the right keywords is an important part of any SEO campaign.

How do you target the site towards a specific search phrase or keyword? By having the keyword in the title tag, the description and in the content. It should also be in the anchor text of links pointing to that site. If you are in a reciprocal link exchange, and the link to your job site is the name of your company, that is far less effective at promoting your website than a link saying ajob search company name. It's a simple step and seemingly obvious, but many website owners do not do that and their site suffers in it's ranking as a result.

With the right proportion of the key word in relation to your content and sufficient inbound links with the right anchor text, your website can become the number 1 site for that term. There is more to SEO than just that, but those are the 2 essential factors. Without good content, or links, your website will never rank well and will never bring in all the business it could.

If you are interested in the history of Fast Search & Transfer, the Norwegian search company that is now to be acquired by Microsoft, you should take a look at the blog of Bjørn Borud of Google’s unit in Trondheim, Norway.

He has now written an article series on the history of Fast, a series which opens with the following wonderful paragraph:

“About 12 years ago, me and three other friends founded a company. We were young, single and what we lacked in experience and business sense, we made up for with pure hubris and a firm conviction that all problems are solvable.”

Admittedly, this was not Fast, but another company that would become a part of the Fast adventure, but the argument holds for Fast as well. You have to believe in yourself in order to succeed as an IT pioneer. These people were the Norwegian equivalents to people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Creativity and innovation

Bjørn discusses the role of nontraditional students and the use of UNIX at what was then the Technical College in Trondheim.

He underlines the role of an open culture that encourages discussions and interactive learning: “The most important resource you need in order to innovate and create, is good people.”

Most of all he stresses the importance of a “can-do” attitude where people — if necessary — rip a system apart and rebuild it if it is misbehaving.

Guardian Networks

His original company was called Guardian Networks AS, and was to produce “a hardened Linux for use in firewalls”. That didn’t work, but the company survived as a UNIX consultancy.

In 1998 the Guardian boys (they are all boys in such histories) were approached by Fast Search and Transfer, a company that had bought the rights to the university based FTPSearch (a search engine used to search for files on Internet servers).

The World’s Biggest Search Engine

Fast asked Bjørn & Co to build a crawler for their new Web search engine, which, according to Bjørn, was another type of technology altogether: “Web search and FTPSearch were in fact two completely separate and un-related code-bases.”

The first version of what was called TheWorldsBiggestSearchEngine (later known as AlltheWeb) were based on the master thesis — a research prototype — of Knut Magne Risvik:

“A ten page memo on the feasibility of building Alltheweb was hammered out by Knut Magne and sent off to Espen Brodin, who then got Robert Keith to cut us a check in order to make it so.”

Source: - pandia