Chapter 19
Ten Myths and Mistakes
In This Chapter
Common mistakes made by site developers
Harmful myths
Problems that hurt your search engine rank
A
lot of confusion exists in the search engine world; a lot of myths and a
lot of mistakes. In this chapter, I quickly run through a few of the ideas
and omissions that can hurt your search engine positions.
Myth: It’s All about Meta
Tags and Submissions
This is the most pervasive and harmful myth of all, and one held by many
Web designers and developers. All you need to do, many believe, is code
your pages with the right meta tags — KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION, and
things like REVISIT-AFTER and CLASSIFICATION — and then submit
your site to the search engines. I know Web designers who tell their clients
that they are search engine experts, then follow nothing more than this
procedure.
It’s completely wrong for various reasons. Most meta tags aren’t particularly
important (see Chapter 6), or aren’t used by the search engines at all.
Without keywords in the page content, the search engines won’t index what
you need them to index. (See Chapters 6 and 7.) And submitting to search
engines doesn’t mean they will index your pages. (See Chapter 11.)
