Myths and Facts

Organic traffic refers to traffic that results from real searches on a search engine as opposed to pay per click ads or other paid ads. Getting your site is in the top results for a popular search term can result in a lot of traffic to your web site.

The more sites that are trying to rank well for a search term, the harder it is to get top placement. For example if you have 500 to 1000 sites that are trying to rank well for a phrase, it's not all that difficult to get your site on the first page of results, but, if you have 400 million web sites competing, it's a different story!

Who do you trust for advice? There are so many people claiming to know the secret to getting your site on the first page of results, most of these people have no clue that what they're selling, teaching, or preaching is wrong. Some DO know their advice is wrong and they simply don't care, they only want your money. I bought products and courses, and read blog after blog after blog. But their advice was wrong too.

Some popular myths.

Myth #1: You need to submit your site to all the search engines on a regular basis. There are sites that you can subscribe to (pay them a monthly amount of money) that will do this for you. It's a complete waste of YOUR money. Why? Search engines find and analyze every web site that they can. They want their results to be better than their competitors. All you have to do when you have a new web site is get its URL linked on a page that is already indexed by the search engines, and the search engines will find you. You can do this with forums, blogs, other sites you own, etc. Once a search has your site in its database, it's there. It'll keep checking your site. You don't have to resubmit it over and over (don't get this confused with blog updates and pinging, that's something different).

Myth #2: One other thing you hear about is the "Google Sandbox". This theory states that a new site will not rank well for competitive search terms for six months to a year after launch, that Google quarantines new sites for that period of time before including them in their search results. I've had new sites start getting search engine traffic in a week. There is no sandbox. Why would a search engine NOT want to return results for a search? The likely source to this myth comes from that fact that the more competitive your targeted search term the more inbound links will be needed to rank high. That takes time, sometimes a lot of time.

Myth #3: The third myth is keyword density, i.e. the number of keywords on your page. If you put your keyword(s) on a page too many times, it's called "stuffing". You don't need to count your keywords, just use natural language. In fact, for Google, you want to make sure you don't use the phrase too many times.

So, what does work?

One thing to understand is that what you do to get good ranking in Google is not the same as for Yahoo or Bing. Some pages will rank well across all three, but it requires a huge number of inbound links and quality content.

Quality matters. Search engines are smart enough to know that you've loaded pages with poor content. They're not correct 100% of the time; after all it's not a human reading the page, but rather a computer. This works in both directions too, sometimes a relevant, well written original page will not rank as high as it probably should, but most of the time, the crappy pages get detected as such and the good pages are recognized as being good. So spend your time building something worthwhile - it will pay off in the long run.

Keyword usage: Use your keywords sparingly: a few times in the header area, in the title, and Meta tags, and a few times in the text on the page. I don't think the exact number matters, it's easy to see what happens when you go from around 8 to something like 25 occurrences. Note that it can take a few weeks for Google to update it's rankings. I've done this several times. What happens when you go from 8 to 20 or is your ranking will go way down. For example, if you were showing up on the 3rd page of results you may now be on the 8th or 9th page of results. Remove all those stuffed keywords and you'll return, after a week or so, to roughly where you were. Don't take this to mean that 8, as I used in this example, or any other number, is the "magic" number of keywords to have on a page, it's more complex than that.

Inbound Links. We know that Google likes sites with lots of inbound links, or links pointing to your site from other sites. So how about outbound links on your site that point outbound to other sites? Do they hurt you? The simple answer is No. I've read articles that say outbound links hurt your rankings, but the authors are wrong. Unless your site is in the following list of categories, you don't want to have links pointing to these kinds of sites: spam sites, hate sites, sites that feature or promote illegal activities, pornography, etc. Having outbound links to these types of sites will hurt your ranking placement and in some cases get you removed (de-listed) from the search engine results. You don't want the reverse either; you don't want lots of those kind of sites pointing to you. However, that's not completely in your control (like the links on your own site are) so it's not going to hurt you if one or two decide to link to you for whatever reason. So, as long as your outbound links don't point to these types of sites, they won't hurt you. After all, that's how the Internet works, one site linking to another.

Summary: SEO is both science and art. If it was all science, a person could create a program to analyze a page and determine how it will rank. Some have come close to doing this, but most programs that claim to do this aren't even close. Why, because it involves factors outside of what's on the page. It's a competition between your page and thousand, even millions, of other web pages. There are things that work and things that don't, and lots of people willing to take your money and run. You can spend thousands of dollars a month for their "secret" knowledge that will only make your sites rankings drop and your pockets empty. Don't let that happen to you.

Real Optimization: Search Engine Optimization.