By Elmer on April 6, 2009

It is no doubt that among the numerous SEO articles we read on the web, many of them are untrue, outdated or simply absurd. Search engine marketing is an evolving industry that when we read articles we have to take note if they were published many years ago; even those written few months ago can still be inaccurate.

These are, in my opinion, common SEO keyword ranking myths that should be debunked, or at least understand properly their purposes.

Updating Site Regularly Helps
It’s good to have regularly updated pages within a site. They help persuade visitors to come back and enable search engine robots to visit sites more frequently. However, mere updates do not contribute to better search engine rankings. They do help though in expanding the list of keywords a website could rank prominently.

Submit URL to 1,000 Directories
Submissions to multiple directories could be an exercise of futility as many of these so-called directories don’t even exist anymore. Submission to DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory or Business.com, if applicable, should be our focus of attention as others have very little number of users and doesn’t warrant any consideration.

Google Sitemap is Required
XML Sitemap is used to help Google identify which pages we desire to be crawled and indexed. However, it does not mean our websites are doomed if we don’t have an XML file in place. XML Sitemap gives ideas to search engines which pages they should visit first. But if they don’t find any, they’ll use traditional means such as links from other web pages.

PPC Will Help Organic Rankings
Pay-per-click campaigns are run independently and doesn’t influence the performance of SEO results. Somehow it’s the other way around, as how we optimize our landing pages can determine the quality score of our paid search keywords. Just because we have PPC campaigns doesn’t mean we have to skip doing SEO.

You Need to Optimize for Long Tail Keywords
I wish there is a way to determine long tail keywords within our sites but I guess there is none nor it is necessary to optimize for them. Long tail refers to a long list of keywords that are multiple variations of our core keywords but have much fewer search volume. That is why we don’t need to optimize for them because the level of competition is lower for these types of keywords.

What we can do is to establish enough content on pages within our site. Such pages will definitely spawn multiple long tail keywords later, as we will find out on our web analytics reports.

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