Today we are going to talk about clearing up some myths, mythbusters style. I’ll pick my top 3 myths and try to “bust” them. Here we go,

1. Keyword Meta tags are important.

The tag awhile back was used to show focus to search engines to help show what keywords were important to that particular site. While it was noted that it did help “dumber” versions of Google to determine keywords, Google now is a lot smarter and can easily determine these keywords without being told what they are.
Here are the facts.

In google webmaster tools, on the dashboard there is a auto populated field called “keywords” , with their significance. I have personally seen this being populated quite accurately on a freshly built site, without the keywords meta tag.

Matt Cuts , Google employee has made this post called – and wait for it,

“Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search”

Myth busted.

2. SEO< will return ROI.
ROI ( return on investment ) is only achieved through SEO, when the campaign is handled well, with the experts in front of the wheel. There are many SEO company out there that claim to provide ROI, that just take your money and secretly return very little. Is your ROI just a monthly ranking report , and nothing else? Is the “expert” guiding your campaign so busy that they struggle to return your calls? If your looking for a ROI , and your advertising investment is online, speak to the ROI experts, Web Marketing Experts. With a proven track record, your in good hands.

3. Multiple sites on the same IP (same server)
This question gets asked a lot around the industry, how many sites can i have on the same ip range before the Google thinks im trying to spam.
Here is a valid argument. Google would know that web host , use the same ip range for thousands of sites. Everyone knows this, and Google must. A popular web host may host similar sites, with similar topics and keywords just but coincidence. And i doubt Google would penalise both sites for the fact that they are using the same web host.
On the flip side, I feel there would be a limit to the amount of similar sites google would allow before penalising said sites. A video i watched by Mat cuts again supports this. It mentions that a web master had 2000 similar sites, and they got penalised , as they were on the same ip. I imagine the Google algorithm working on the grounds of,
“there is no way there can be 2000 sites with similar content legitimately, and therefore , i will wave my penalisation stick around these 2000 sites”

That Mat Cuts Article can be found here

So this one is busted, but plausible as well.