When it comes to SEO, myths and misinformation can cost you a hell of a lot!

• Lost rankings.
• Lost time.
• Marketing budget costs.
• Loss of profits and sales.

As stated previously, when working in a small business, time is precious. It is therefore imperative that we get some of this misinformation about SEO out of the way so that you may focus on SEO that will produce results and business income.

1. SEO is difficult.

You may have heard the saying, "SEO is not rocket science" or you may have been told that “SEO is very extremely difficult and one needs a science degree to do it”.

Well, the first comment is the closest description although an additional part was left off…

"SEO is not rocket science however it is time consuming!"

Anyone can learn SEO if the wish to devote some money and time to it. It is no different to any other skill, a certain amount of time must be put in to achieve results and obtain a level of proficiency.

As for the people saying SEO is too hard, have you noticed who they usually are?

You guessed it, the big companies or individuals who are charging mega bucks for their SEO services. They certainly don’t want every company learning SEO or taking it in house do they?

That would mean loss of business and them having to decrease their outlandish fees! Wouldn’t that be a pity.

2. SEO submissions.

The days of submitting your website to the major search engines is long gone.  

To get your whole site indexed simply submit one of your pages to any of the major social media sites, submit a free press release using a free PR service or build an xml sitemap and submit to Google sitemaps.

3. Submit to thousands of search engines.

This one I truly love! Thousands of search engines usually mean hundreds of tiny search engines and directories no one uses plus thousands of ‘Free For All” (FFA) pages that will quickly deflate your rankings on any search engine.

Apart from some search engines based on your business theme and local search, the only search engines you need to be on are these top 5.

As you can see from the statistics they make up over 90% of all searches done online using a major search engine.

4. The goal is to get as many top rankings as possible.

As discussed earlier, the goal is to get the maximum return of investment for your SEO efforts.

5. SEO requires continual tweaking to keep my rankings in place.

It is actually quite the opposite!

Although some maintenance work is required on a monthly basis to keep rankings in place and your website visible as a whole, it is very minimal.

In general, it costs far more to achieve good rankings than to keep them. Once ranked, SEO is a much more cost effective than any other marketing method currently online apart from viral marketing.

6. SEO firms that guarantee rankings should always be chosen.

No firm can guarantee any type of rankings within a given time space as they…

1. Do not own the search engines.

2. Do not work for the search engines.

3. Do not know the exact algorithms of any search engine.

SEO is not an exact science. Even with all the tools you may have, know one knows the exact rules or algorithms by which the search engine rank websites.

With good knowledge and experience of which you will achieve, one can still only estimate the work that may be required to get ranking on a given keyword or phrase.

It is therefore not only untrue of any company to claim that they can provide exact rankings, it is also unethical. Such companies should be kept away from.

If you do decide to outsource your work, the best companies are ones that will give you an honest answer to your questions and try and tailor an optimal SEO campaign to suit your business marketing budget.

That's it for this email. In our next correspondence we will be looking at "SEO & internet marketing similarities".

Until our next tutorial.

Regards
Chris Taylor