Herman’s top 9 SEO myths dispelled

 1. I have to buy a new domain name to capitalize on a set of keywords: I would not advise people to purchase a new domain unless you have to. The search engines put a lot of weight behind how old your website and domain is or “has been” around. While you can purchase a new domain and redirect your old one to the new one, as a pre-emptive strike against competition, your best bet is to use your existing domain/website. Let’s say you're redesigning or starting from scratch and you have to use a brand-new domain for some reason, you can expect at least somewhat of a loss in search engine positioning.

  2. I need to optimize my site for the search engines. You need to optimize your site to meet users needs. If you don't know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide demographic information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

  3. Design and categorize my site architecture and navigation on users? NO!!!! based on your keyword research. Your research may uncover undiscovered areas of interest or ways of categorizing your products/services that you may wish to add to your site. For instance, let's say your site sells jewelry. There are numerous ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that people will find the ornaments they're looking for. Presumably, your keyword research will show you that people are looking at jewelry in many different ways. Your site’s navigation  should showcases the various ways of searching for jewelry. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as specific price ranges, specific types of metals, gemstones, cuts, etc.

  4.  Research your keyword phrases extensively. The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google's Keyword Tool. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords such as "travel" or "vacation," as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about.

  5. Programming your site to be "crawler-friendly." The search engines can't read JavaScript links and menus, and can't interpret Flash. This doesn't mean that you can't use these things on your site; you can! However, you do need to provide alternate means of navigating your site. You will need to make sure that you always have some form of HTML links in the main navigation on every page which link to the top-level pages of your site. Think sitemap! Also, there's nothing wrong with graphical image navigation as long as you do not forget about href tags and alt tags…speaking of which:

6. Brand your internal text links and clickable image alt tags as clearly and descriptively as possible. Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your anchor text to help them understand what they're going to find once they click through. Be as straightforward as possible with text and graphical link on your site. The good thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you're pointing to by using its main keyword phrase.