Today I received one of those awful spam emails trying to tell me how to SEO a website. I usually delete them, but occasionally read a few extracts just to see what the gist of the message is. The one I received today had me in hysterics. It’s from some idiot called Seomul Davis, and it’s blatantly clear he knows absolutely nothing about SEO.
He’s written an article on the top ten myths in SEO, and some of his ‘myths’ are quite frightening. Let me begin…
From: SEO News [seo@seo-news.com]
Subject: Organic SEO Top 10 MythsOrganic SEO Top 10 Myths
By Seomul Davis (c) 2008There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.
OK, fair enough start. There are a lot of myths on the Internet about SEO due to people not knowing what they’re talking about… sadly Seomul Davis is one such person.
Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website rankings. Only update your website content if it is necessary and not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that haven’t been updated in years!
Oh you have got to be kidding me? You couldn’t be more wrong, you could try, but you’d fail. Content is the single most important aspect to SEO. Fresh, original, unique content. Anyone who listens to this idiot will find themselves nowhere, more importantly no one will find them… in Google at least.
What’s more interesting is that Seomul Davis contradicts himself in an article he wrote here:
If rising high on the SERPs is your goal, then update your content as often as you can, but on a regular basis. Google, MSN, and Yahoo! reward regular updating with higher SE rankings.
So which is it? Does content increase your rankings, or does it have no effect? I know the answer, you obviously don’t.
Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google positioning without H1 but they certainly don’t hurt so use H tags correctly.
There’s no evidence to prove that H1 tags help your ranking? OK mate, you believe what you want. I hope no one else believes you, for their sake.
Organic SEO Myth 10: Your pages should be optimized for the long tail keywords. This is not true. Nowadays, long-tail keyword phrases are no longer effective as not many pages use them and not many people search using long tails. You can include these keywords in blogs or even an article, but that is not really optimization.
Long tail keywords are no longer effective? Oh for fuck’s sake. This guy is a fucking muppet. Long tail keywords are vital for SEO, not least because you get a higher conversion rate with them. Seomul Davis… you’re a moron.
I absolutely loved this last paragraph though.
Remember don’t go spreading any SEO myths that you believe may be true. Test it yourself several times on different websites before reaching any conclusion as there are other factors involved as well.
No, you’re right there. Don’t go spreading myths that you believe to be true. Shame you don’t take your own advice, idiot. If you want to spout your shit on your own website then fine, but don’t email this crap to me.
Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.
