Common Search Engine Optimization Misconceptions

More Sites Are Better Then One – This idea sounds like it would work.  If one website gets x amount of traffic why not add another site and get even more traffic. If it sounds to good to be true, it usually is, just as in this case.  What really occurs are the search engines see two sites that have duplicate content and either penalize one or both sites for spamming. How does this affect your site? You should be prepared for   zero keyword placement results on the search engines, little or no natural search engine traffic, and a possible page rank decrease on Google. What the search engines are looking for are clean, unique, and content rich websites. Instead of building 10 duplicate sites, you should focus on one website generating new and unique content.

Weekly URL Submission – It won’t hurt my website to submit to search engines every week. In fact your site can be penalized for using search engine software that submits your site to the search engines more then once a month.  It is considered spam to repeatedly submit a website to a search engines. Most search engines will find your site by following links from other sites. I do recommend hand submitting your site to the major search engines monthly to ensure changes are indexed.

SEO Software Can’t Hurt My Rankings – Almost all of the search engines frown upon seo software. You can review Google’s submission guidelines by clicking on the following link:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
In the quality guidelines it states “Don't send automated queries to Google”, meaning do not use SEO software programs that perform rankings checks, build doorway pages, or uses other methods of spamming to achieve rankings. What does Google say about not following the search engine submission guidelines “If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index”.

You can view Yahoo’s guidelines by clicking the following link:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html.

Fit As Many Keywords As Possible On A Page – Many webmaster believe that they should try to stuff as many possible keywords into their content and meta tags as possible. The end result of such practices is zero ranking and possible penalties from the search engines. You should select a few choice keywords for each unique page on your website. If you don’t have any ranking results in the search engines try to select keywords that are not highly competitive like “free online games” instead start with a keyword that has a good search amount but is not as highly competitive. You need to build traffic to your site before you attempt to go against the big boys.

More Link Partners Mean Better Rankings – With all the fuss about link partners and increasing Google Page Rank it’s can be very confusing to know what is considered good or bad linking practices. You only want to link to sites that are related to your own site and that have a Page Rank similar to your own. You do not want to link to other sites just because they offered to place your link on their site. This practice can actually decrease your Page Rank on Google and affect your ranking results. Do avoid sites that are considered “link farms” and are viewed negatively by the search engines. The search engines won’t penalize your site if your link is found on another website, but they will penalize your site if you are linking to sites that are using spam methods to try and obtain ranking results.