Ryan Pitylak Marketing Blog

The day has finally come when Google has made their traffic stats available in a meaningful format.  The bars they used to use were horrible (albeit better than with no bars).

This is great news for trying to actually pick keywords for natural search.

Ryan Pitylak is active in the SEO community.

Search Engine Land wrote a great article about the top 10 SEO myths. I’ve provided my comments below each myth.

Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines.

Comment: Your site should be found through links from other sites. Submitting them to search engines does nothing because your site will only gain popularity if other sites link to you.

Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap.

Comment: A well designed site should have a good linking structure, and the search engine should properly follow the linking structure without problem. In this case, you would not need a sitemap.

Myth 3: You need to update your site frequently.

Comment: This has a lot to do with the type of site you have. However, most content is inherently static and doesn’t require that you update it too frequently.

Myth 4: PPC ads will help/hurt rankings.

Comment: I believe these have been purposefully made separate so that there is no confusion about how it impacts results. I would argue that Google should consider giving people better rankings if they’re willing to pay for keywords, but I sure 100 other people could argue why that’s against the social good. I just believe that the ability to pay for keywords is an indicator of a keyword’s success for the company, and therefore, should be an indicator that the site is relevant to the topic.

Myth 5: Your site will be banned if you ignore Google’s guidelines.

Comment: I’ve never personally known of anyone who this has happened to. However, I don’t hang out in the black hat SEO community, and I don’t know what happens there. My assumption is that people in that community bend the rules so much that they do get into trouble. However, unless your doing things that are just plain bad, you’ll be fine.

Myth 6: Your site will be banned if you buy links.

Comment: Ha ha. That’s all I have to say about that. Advertising is advertising. You can penalize a company for buying ads on another website.

Myth 7: H1 (or any header tags) must be used for high rankings.

Comment: I believe this has some value, but it must be part of a bigger content on-site picture.

Myth 8: Words in your meta keyword tag have to be used on the page.

Comment: I don’t believe your keyword tags have much to do with rankings.

Myth 9: SEO copy must be 250 words in length.

Comment: Why not 200? Why not 300? Who picked 250? That’s funny.

Myth 10: You need to optimize for the long tail.

Comment: Love the long tail. Stick those keywords in your description tags, but don’t really worry about them too much. Don’t stick them in your H tags, don’t put them in your alt tags, etc. You should work hard for the top keywords. Remember…Focus.

Ryan Pitylak is a search engine optimization guru.

Search engine optimization on a local level is an interesting proposition for most businesses.   Depending on whether you are a local business trying to increase your SEO rankings, or whether you are a national business with many local services, your SEO strategy will vary.

I ran a local Austin website for a long time, so I learned how to promote a local website.  The main strategy is to ensure that you have enough local content developed so that you can be shown in the results for long-tail local keywords.  You want to create a lot of content about each keyword that’s relevant to your area, and ideally you’d create a page specifically designed to target that keyword.  And, don’t forget, you need links from local businesses in your area.

If you have a national business with local services, your strategy will vary, but only slightly.  You’re essentially doing all of the same things that you would do for a local website, but each page on your site that is linked to a specific location should be treated as an individual site from a content and linking perspective; the advice for these areas can be found above.  The extra component to consider is proper interlinking within the site, as it can be hard to make all of those pages show up highly in the search results.