I swear I am not talking about search engine optimization of a food joint or a restaurant. Nor am I interested in SEO for cows. The title is just an adaptation of the proverb – “sacred cows make good burgers”, which means that commonly held beliefs when broken, yield good results.

There are numerous blog posts each day on hundreds of SEO blogs that discuss what to do and what matters when in comes to ranking in the top 10 results in Google. But a lot of misconceptions float in the minds of small business owners, especially in India and other Asian countries, which have heard about the concept of SEO or Search Engine Optimization and have heard about meta tags!

Let me try to clear some of the misconceptions that are important if you are serious about making a mark online

• Meta tags – The dodo was a flightless bird and the meta tags are flightless SEO entities when it comes to using them in 2009. They are NOT important from search engines perspective. The only advantage that you get by a properly placed meta description tag is that search engines use them as a snippet of text when your page is displayed in search rankings. If the keywords that the user has typed in her query are found in your meta description, they are highlighted and if the meta description is formatted well, it helps build a well sounding logic which increases the chances of your results getting clicked on the SERP (search engine result page).
• Flash is evil – Yes, ALL FLASH websites are, if you do not know about workarounds such as the swfobject or SIFR. For an average business which wants to project a sense of beauty and attraction on its website homepage, an externally called flash file is an absolutely no harm.
• Text should be first and scripts should be called externally – This is excellent from the POV of fast loading of the page, but hardly matters when it comes to spiderability or ranking of your website. Search engines have long been known to ignore the code that they do not find important.
• CSS should be external – As with JS/VB, it is thought that CSS should always be called from an external file. That is fine again from a design perspective where we want to separate design from content but doesn’t have any impact on search rankings. Always remember that whether called inline or from an external file, search engines will access your CSS files to understand the layout and font related usage on the website. We have heard of cases when webmasters have modified text/links to make them hidden or 1 pixel in height. And at the same time we have also heard that such behavior has been penalized by search engines; especially Google.
• Code should substantially differ page to page – Search engines don’t care about the templates and other coding on your sight. What really matters to them is content. In fact dreamweaver templates, SSI (server side includes) and CMS templates have been actively accepted by search engines as a valid form of web authoring. This also tell us another point – a link from a template (bottom or side) or a link that is omnipresent on a website (from all or many pages) doesn’t carry equal weight as compared to a link from within the content.
• Hundreds of search engine should list your site – We know where it came from – the search engine optimization companies. They submit your site to hundreds of search engines. Are there really so many? May be. Who cares? Where do you go to find information on the web? Isn’t it just Google/Yahoo/Rediff(rarely) or MSN/Live search? Those are the engines that command more than 95% of the share in the world market. Rediff is just an Indian search major and no presence outside India. Just get ranked in these search engines and see the traffic flowing to your website.
• Dynamic sites do not rank well – Who said that? The trend is moving fast and now with the evolution of content management systems such as Drupal and Wordpress, search engine indexing is no more limited to your website static sections. Moreover, it is much easier to manage content using a CMS as compared to static update and upload of web pages and resources. Even traditionally known as non-search friendly CMS such as Joomla are supporting many plugins which make the URLs search engine friendly and avoid duplicate content.
• Will we rank by next weekend? – No – SEO is not a sprint, it is a marathon. You need to be steady to show up there and then maintain the rankings. If you want quick results, go for PPC advertising, such as the Google Adwords. These are the sponsored results on Google (left hand side and top). You pay for a click and if your ads are relevant to a query, you pay less. (Duh… not that simple!)
• SEO and branding are enemies – No. They are Siamese twins if you implement your search engine optimization strategy properly. They are enemies if you do not. Brands have always ruled and search is no exception.

Feeling better? I hope you do. If not, feel free to clear your misconceptions about SEO by posting questions in form of blog comments.