Our next few posts will dispel a number of SEO myths that have been plaguing our efforts to teach and educate America to have a transparent and clear understanding of what SEO is really all about.  Additionally, let me also take a moment to encourage you to pick up the phone, and ask one of our search engine optimization experts about anything here, or anything else you might have heard regarding search engine optimization.    

• You can keep all your Page Rank/link juice by not going too link crazy.
  

This may be conventional wisdom and highly accepted, but the math doesn’t work this way and those who firmly believe this one, are making a mistake in their architectural approach.  While keeping most/all links internally can help increase your overall Page Rank on your site, the way the original Page Rank formula works forces every site to give out link presence whether it does so explicitly or not.

• You shouldn’t use Google Analytics, because Google will start taking note of your stats, IP’s, and SEO practices to learn everything they can and additionally keep a watchful eye on your progress.

f there’s any truth to this one (and I’m pretty sure Google has far better things to do than keep track of our small scale SEO methods and projects to make sure we’re following the rules) I think its STILL a good trade off.  We’ve just been made aware too many times through potential clients about how many people have been ripped off by companies who weren’t transparent and didn’t have a way to report/show the analytics of the project.  That said…we advocate installing Google analytics immediately, if you haven’t already set it up.  It’s a free system from Google, it’s insanely user friendly, and once installed, it’s a window to the traffic and visitors of your site.  The more you know about them, and their whereabouts on your site when they come to visit, the more you can scale the sites approach and direction making sure to increase the conversion rate.  Additionally, it will make sure you don’t get burned by a company telling you that you got 20,000 hits on your website this month, no calls, no leads, and no conversions.  Sound familiar?  As important as SEO and visibility are, there’s never anything more important than sales/converting the visitors that come to your site into clients.

• With all the new ‘personalization’ code out there now, there’s no longer such a thing as being Number 1, because everyone sees different results at this point.

While it does certainly seem that when the personalized web search is set to 0 (“&pws=0″ added to the end of the Google SERP URL) that the results will vary based on your personalization…it ultimately is still of course overall a myth…otherwise, it wouldn’t be in the list.  Although the results change, it’s really a minor change typically.  You can notice this example with a nice ambiguous search term.  For example, if we search Google for ‘Wizards’…whether or not the personalization is set to 0 or not…when you examine something this general…the results won’t change much based on the browser settings.  Also, how does Google know you mean the basketball team and not ‘Harry Potter’?  Our SEO experts can help to tailor a campaign for your needs, to ensure you dominate the position goal, despite area, general search terms, or web design.