by Tom Jelneck

There are experts everywhere now! You can find a health expert, a culinary expert, a rat trapping expert and of course, an SEO expert online.  With so many so called experts lurking out there, how do you know who to trust and who to listen to? We’ve taken the liberty of listing some ‘disinformation’ that should prompt you to run the other way when dealing with an alleged self proclaimed ’SEO expert’.

5 common SEO myths:

1. You are losing valuable traffic because you don’t have ALT tags on ALL of your images.

An ALT tag is basically a description of an image in html.  While the browser is loading the web site, images may load last, so the alt tag is shown describing what that particular picture is.  This actually is more of a usability issue and is there to assist folks with disabilities.  While keywords in the ALT tag do in theory help with keyword density on the page in question, it will not drastically improve organic search engine rankings.

2. You need to submit your web site to 20,099 directories and search engines to succeed.

Nope. Don’t buy this one either.  Here’s the bottom line with link submission and search engine / directory submission: where do the PEOPLE search? Google, MSN & Yahoo.  Focus on marketing your web site where people go to search.  When is the last time you used searchbatswana.com to find a local contractor?

3. We GUARANTEE top ten organic search engine placement.

Time to Run. NO ONE can guarantee that you will be number one organically in Google, MSN or Yahoo. We tell people, we probably could guarantee it if we owned the search engines… but honestly, we probably wouldn’t be writing this blog if that were the case.

4.) You will be number one in Google within 3 business days.

Put the running shoes back on. EVEN if this actually happens (at the same time hell freezes over and pigs fly) it will not last. Google has several filters built in to prevent scammers and blackhat SEO tactics, etc.  There are of course spammers etc. who are one step ahead, but ultimately, Google catches on.  Better to NOT tick off Google with shady SEO tactics.

5. We NEED to submit your web site to Google every day.

Wrongo. In fact, we don’t submit web sites to search engines.  Google is a big boy and knows how to gather its own information.  The key is to make certain that your web site is easy to find.  One method, we create an xml sitemap and create a Google webmaster tool account.

There is no magic fix out there for SEO and search engine rankings.  When you are shopping for an SEO consultant, be sure to test their results and ask questions. Can you find them under competitive terms? The proof is in the pudding.  And we love pudding!