1. I must be ranked #1 on Google
Getting ranked at the top is certainly something to aspire to but it is by no means a measure of failure if you are not. Every site will have a list of dozens if not hundreds of keywords that drive traffic to their site, some very broad such as “sport shoes” and others very specific such as “Nike sport shoes Lancaster”. To be number one on the broad search queries is typically the hunting ground of medium to large companies.

2. Banners are a great sales tool
The era of traditional banners on websites as a direct sales tool is coming to an end. With banner blindness and our increasing awareness of advertising online leading to people asking why they should bother clicking on a banner, banner click through rates have fallen to their lowest levels since records began, currently at 0.18% (source: http://www.adtech.info/en/pr-07-10.html)

3. If I pay for advertising on Google it will help my organic ranking
Quite simply, no it won’t. Not one bit. Google keeps the two areas of its search engine very separate from one another. Being placed high (or low) in one has no effect on the other.

4. If I put lots of adverts on my site at least one will be clicked on
The idea here is to put so many banners on your site a visitor will click on at least one of them. Unfortunately the exact opposite is true. Research is showing people are becoming increasingly ‘banner blind’, filtering out the noise and clutter they deem irrelevant (www.useit.com). By placing dozens of banners on one page, a visitor will scan the page and see only ‘noise’ and bounce away.

Keep the page clean and simple so that as the visitor’s eyes scan the page their attention is drawn to one or two key areas, and put banners on pages that are relevant so that visitor’s eyes are already processing similar information.

5. The Meta keywords tag is used by search engines to rank a page
The major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) haven’t used the Meta Keywords tag since the turn of the century. Abused by spam sites to influence their ranking, search engines have either stopped using it altogether or watered down their influence so much that not having any Meta Keywords is very rarely of any detriment to a site’s ranking.

6. The more I spend on Google AdWords the higher I will be ranked
Well, yes and no. Obviously the basic model Google AdWords uses is essentially an auction, whereby the more you bid on a keyword the higher you will be ranked. But Google also uses what it calls a “Quality score”. Google has never released the specifics of this calculation but it is based upon factors surrounding the Click Through Rate (CTR) an advertiser ‘s advert has, and works using the premise that an advert that has a high CTR is more relevant to a search query and deserves to be ranked higher. Over time an advertiser with a good quality score can bid less and still be ranked higher than a competitor who has a poorer quality score. For example:

A basic bid model would show this:
Advertiser / Bid / Rank
Widgets.com / £0.50 / 1
Gadgets.com / £0.40 / 2
Trinkets.com / £0.35 / 3

With Google’s Quality Score, we could see this:

Advertiser / Bid / Rank
Widgets.com / £0.50 / 1
Trinkets.com / £0.35 / 2
Gadgets.com / £0.40 / 3

If you have any more you would like to share, leave us a comment below