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Since the dawn of search engine creation, man has created myths
and legends to explain what he himself could not. These myths have
been passed down through the years from generation to generation.
With the advent of modern science, however, we are now able to put
these myths to bed forever.
Myths and Legends
1. Mega-Meta
There is no bigger myth than that of the meta-tag. If anyone tells
you that the secret to high search engine rankings is with meta-tags
laugh at them and call them names. This, my friends is an antiquated
myth.
A meta-tag is in the head of your HTML and contains keywords and
a description of the page. The code looks like this for the page
you are reading:
<head>
<title>Higher Ranked In Search Engines</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="obtain, high,
higher, search, engine, rank, rankings, ranked, engines, tips,
help, advice, web, website">
<meta name="description" content="Learn how
to obtain higher rankings in the search engines with Brina.com.">
</head>
There was a time long ago when meta-tags were created just for
the search engines. Afterall, if you were a newly designed search
engine robot, wouldn't you like to receive a little bundle of information
about each page you indexed? That would be easier than a complex
algorithm and web designers are trust-worthy people, right? Well,
of course not. All a crafty web designer would have to do to spam
the search engine would be to add sexy words to their meta-tag keywords
and trick visitors into visiting their site on something completely
different - say shoe polish.
Some search engines still figure your meta-tags into their algorithms
so do use them. More often, the search engines will display your
meta-description under your link so spend some time writing accurate
descriptions of each page.
2. Hidden Content
As the average bandwidth and connection speed increased, web
designers were afforded a lot more freedom in their designs. More
images could be used and then came the advent of Macromedia Flash
which allowed a designer to use scalable vector graphics to create
eye-catching animations. All of this was wonderful except the search
engines couldn't see any of it and the image/Flash ladden sites
started to lose their grip on high rankings.
About this time, another little trick-of-the-trade was born. Web
designers would fill the page under the flash movie or image map
with content masked in the same color of the background. The visitor
couldn't see the icky content but the search engines didn't know
the difference and presto - they were back in the top ten.
But remember what we learned in lesson one about content?
The search engine algorithms are designed to provide the best content
to their users. Providing content that the visitor can't see is
useless. Therefore, the best search engine algorithms were programmed
to look for this type of spam.
What's more, not only will most search engines dismiss a site's
feable attempts to spam with hidden content, many will penalize
the site and even exclude it altogether. Yikes!
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