Photo Source: Web Design Talk

It seems that SEO tactics are constantly changing. Google or Bing can make an update that makes what you use to take for granted irrelevant. We are going to sort through some of the myths, facts, and strategy.

Myths Busting

Myth: Meta Tags

Spam tends to take advantage of all good SEO ideas rendering them useless. Meta Tags ended up being one of them. Here's how it use to work. You would rank your keywords by how important they were to your website. When someone typed in a relevant word in the search engine, your results would come up in a query. This was eventually dropped by most major search engines due to spamming.

Fact: Title tag and a meta tag description are extremely important. This is what you want to focus on. Also, they are still useful for web crawling. Keep that in mind!

Myth: Keywords

That is simple, you may say, just use keywords. Everyone knows that keywords do wonders for SEO. This is wrong, well, sort of. Key words can work. Here is how they do not work.

• Keyword stuffing and density. Do not try to reach everyone with keywords, quality is more important than quantity. Also, it looks like spam.
• Google is getting better at understanding full queries. See how.

Fact: Keywords are still important, just do not make your page look like a keyword factory. It is about content. Keep everything relevant. You are likely to rank higher if there is a sense of trust. If you look like a spam bot, that trust evaporates.

Read more about keywords and meta tags here.

Myth: Links

The more links, the higher rating. Plus I can pay people to link me to their website. Everyone wins, right?

Fact: Manipulative linking is also considered pretty spammy. Links can improve your ranking, but it is better to create content that people want to share. Google and other search engines have tools to figure out if you are using excessive linking or registering as spam.

Read more about linking here

Myth: Content

Sometimes I reuse my content on different parts of my website. Sometimes I accidentally list a product twice. It really isn't a big deal.

Fact: Duplicated content can destroy SEO. The same goes for plagiarized content. The search engine does not know which page or section to save in its query, or what version to link to. This will result in a lower rank and less traffic.

Read more about duplicates here.

Search Engines

Now that we cleared away some of the myths of SEO, lets put this into action with strategy. Here are two major search engines to keep in mind.

Bing

• Facebook introduced Graph search with Bing, allowing users to search by location
• Bing and Yahoo are combined
• The algorithm is less complex and may offer different results than Google

Black Hat vs White Hat

Finally, we come to two popular methods in dealing with SEO. This is where you can decide which side of the road you are on. Maybe you want to reconsider some of your SEO techniques after you figure that out.

Black Hat

• Aggressive SEO style
• Uses link farms, where sites all link back to each other, and paid links. 
• Uses keyword stuffing
• Hidden Text