I get a lot of questions about search engine optimization (aka: doing stuff to your website so that it shows up highly in the search engines). What it is, how it works, etc. I’m sure you’ve done research on it, talked about it, or at least nodded vaguely when someone else mentioned that lovely acronym — SEO.
When a client comes to me about search engine optimization, my first question is usually “What are you currently doing?” I’m often shocked at the answers. Clearly, there is some confusion about what works and what doesn’t. For the next week or so, I’m going to clear the air.
Myth #1: If I click on my own links a bunch of times, Google will be tricked into thinking that my site is awesome.
Errrmmm…no. I wish. Well, no, actually I don’t wish. Can you imagine if all we had to do to get ranked higher was to click on our own links? The number one ranked sites would be spammers who build auto-clicking robots. It wouldn’t work.
This one’s closely related to the “If I search for my name a bunch of times, Google will think I’m super popular” myth. Sorry guys. That’s not going to work either.
Stomp the myth
An infinitely better use of your time would be to change the titles on your pages to include the search engine terms that you want to be found for (preferably, keywords that are well-researched so that you know that you have a chance of competing for them).
Your title shows up between the <title> and </title> tags in your HTML. When you’re looking at your website, it usually shows up at the top of your browser (if you look at mine, you’ll notice it says “Web design that excites people: S.Joy Studios”). Use your keywords first, and then put the name of your website and the title of the page. Your titles may end up being long and potentially strange-looking, but no one cares in the slightest (except the search engines…and they like it a lot.)
3 Comments
Maybe this is derived from the pay per click world? (And if the links are to your own pages, it does count as more page views in the analytics.)
Perhaps it does. But yeah…it may inflate your Google Analytics statistics, but that really doesn’t help you any. Google doesn’t use those statistics to determine page rank.
I love the myths debunked posts. Great website. Ursula
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