There are so many myths

There are so many myths, legends and simple rumors surrounding most of search engine optimization practices. And they are growing exponentially. It seems that there is no consensus about anything in SEO nowadays. There are plenty of SEO blogs where you can read an article and find a dozen contradictory blog entries in the archives on the same site.

And what about all those horror stories of a mythical Google Sandbox, that keeps new sites without any PageRank or optimization for a year, as if it were some sort of virtual purgatory? What does a web site owner think after reading all this stuff?

Putting aside all these rumors and gossip, I can state with certainty one thing that I know for sure. If you create a web site oriented with user’s experience in mind and have a positive response from people, who like what you do and/or what you offer them, you have nothing to be afraid of. Naturally, it helps if, in addition, your site is properly optimized and you’ve done your homework on keyword research and other SEO 101.

If, on the other hand, you created a site in order to manipulate search engines and its spiders only, well, this is a different story. Or if an amateur SEO promised a web site owner to deliver great SEO results and this is just not happening, then this SEO has to come up with some story to explain why he can not deliver.

I am not here to judge or point fingers at anybody. I just remember the first half of the 90s when a lot of people with practically no experience started to apply for a “webmaster” job. There was web sites explosion on the Internet, then. And companies would hire just anybody who could create web page with visual Netscape or FrontPage editors. Eventually, employers figured out who was who, but this experience cost them dearly.