Stop the Voodoo!

Stop the Voodoo!

These days, there are many "respected" SEO professionals that will use "SEO Voodoo" to try to get your website listed. It works in the short term, but beware of the long term consequences!

Today I read a blog post by a "respected" SEO professional. This person makes a living doing SEO and is fairly well known in the community. Unfortunately this person's blog posts are full of misinformation that has long since been discredited, yet people still believe it.

Today's "voodoo" was all about how it's important to use keywords in your website's URL path. For example: www.domain.com/keyword.html

Here's are some problems with that statement.

1. It was a naked assertion. Absolutely no evidence was provided to back that opinion. No statements from Google, no research testing this statement, nothing.
2. Google has never stated that they give any weight to keywords in URL paths. Think about it, SEO's often stuff keywords into URL's, regardless of whether or not they're appropriate to what's on the page. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
3. This person tried to claim that you will see those keywords highlighted in search engine result pages (SERPS). Yes, you will see keywords highlighted in SERPs, but that has nothing to do with Google believing those words to be important. If that were true, you could get to the top of the SERPs by just repeating your keywords over and over and over ... "Keyword density" is a myth.

In all fairness, there was a survey of "SEO experts" posted as "evidence". As we know, surveys aren't actually evidence, they're just a collection of opinions, and we all know what opinions are like ... SEO surveys are worthless at best, because most SEO's believe crazier stuff than conspiracy theorists. For example, in this survey of "experts" believe Keyword Meta Tags are #24 in importance for SEO, even though Google has repeatedly stated that they ignore the Meta Keywords Tag completely. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search.

Put your keywords to work where they count, and do it naturally.

• Title tag
• Anchor link (internal and external)
• H tags (h1, h2, etc)
• Image alt attributes

Stop the voodoo and start doing real SEO!

Cheers,
Chris