China Watch Blog presents Michael Bluejay’s “Top 16 SEO Myths” in a four part series, which the Master describes as “Things you ‘know’ which aren’t so.
Question 1. Do I have to submit my site to a search engine for it to get listed?
FACT: Submission is unnecessary. A search engine will always find your site as long as some other site links to it. I never submit my sites to the search engines.
Q 2. Do I have to periodically re-submit my site to the search engines.
FACT: Resubmission is unnecessary. Once a site is in a search engine, it’s in for good (unless it resorts to trickery and gets banned). There is zero reason to keep submitting a site to a search engine. Resubmission is a waste of time. Anyone selling a resubmission service is a con artist.
Q 3. Does having Meta tags help my rankings.
FACT: META tags don’t affect your rankings. The search engines ignore META keyword and description tags for ranking purposes, for an obvious reason: Taking the webmasters’ word for what their site should rank well for would be a pretty stupid way for the engines to rank pages.
Q 4. Should I focus on getting great rankings rather than making sure my visitors become customers. After all, it’s not how many sales I make, it’s how many people walk through the door – or maybe even just how many people just see the door without walking in.
FACT: Ranking isn’t everything. Many webmasters are so focused on ranking that they forget the obvious: A good ranking doesn’t always mean more visitors, and more visitors doesn’t always mean more sales.
The reason a good ranking doesn’t always equal more visitors is that people won’t click onto your website just because they see it listed in the SERPs. A person who typed a query is looking for something. When they get the ten results they don’t just click them blindly, but rather they read the titles and snippets to see whether they think the site will provide what they’re looking for. If they think it doesn’t then they won’t click, even if you’re ranked #1. So it’s especially important to make sure your TITLE reads like a good AD, by succinctly telling potential visitors what you offer. For the snippet, I recommend Jill Whalen’s article on getting a good snippet.
Conversion rate — The ratio of visitors who take the action you want, to the total number of visitors.
Even when you get visitors to your site, it’s not a given that they’ll buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, or take whatever action you wanted them to take. To make your conversion rate as high as possible your page must load quickly, look professional, be extremely clear about what it is you offer and what the visitor’s next step should be, and provide some important information (such as sample products and pricing) right on the landing page, with no clicking required. Most webmasters’ time would be better spent focusing on their conversion rate rather than their rankings. After all, a 2% increase in conversion is twice as good as a 1% increase in traffic.
Finally, a top ranking on a highly-trafficked search term may be no better than decent rankings on a wide array of less popular terms. Success is not always measured by how high you get for one particular term.
If you think China Watch Blog's information is useful, click on cup of coffee on left hand side and make a small contribution via PayPal
