SEO Myths
Following on from Marie’s post about PPC Myths, I thought it might be appropriate to write about a few SEO myths doing the rounds.
Meta Keywords Matter
In short, they don’t. Not when it comes to Google anyway, as they finally admitted last Sseptember http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html.
Some of the other search engines may still use them, so there is no harm in including them at the moment, however they are becoming few and far between due to spammers over using them to gain artificially high rankings on searches that are not relevant to the website content.
Meta Description Does not Matter
While it is true that the meta description does not influence your search engine rankings, have you ever wondered where the search engines get the site description they display below the links? That’s the meta description at work! A good meta description can make your listing on the search engine stand out from the competition.
A Google Site Map Will Increase Your Ranking
No it won’t! Google Site Maps do have a very important role to play, but SEO is not one of them. The site map will inform Google that your site exists, and help it to find pages that it may not have found on its own. It will encourage Google to index your site more quickly, so that you appear in the rankings quicker, but it has absolutely no effect on your position within those rankings.