Terry Van Horne: 3 SEO “Best Practices” That Nobody Understands

If you’ve been in SEO for more than five minutes, you know there are certain “rules” or best practices by which everyone takes as law. But Terry Van Horne, writing at the Fire Horse Trail blog, says there are at least 3 Misunderstood SEO Best Practices that are accepted as truth by even the most experienced SEO experts.

• Accepted Practice #1: Pages should be built for Search Engines, not Users. Van Horne says this is not a good “best practice” for several reasons. First, search engines aren’t buying your products, people are. Second,algorithms change in search engines all the time. You don’t want to become a slave to the algorithm. Third, bowing to the will of a search engine now may eliminate future options that you may have had otherwise. For example, if you eliminate meta keyword tags to please Google because Google doesn’t use them, you may be eliminating the possibility of being seen on other search engines with a different algorithm.
• Accepted Practice #2: Google only indexes 70 characters in Titles. We’ve all heard this one, but Van Horne says that we have it wrong. While it’s true that Google only displays up to 70 characters in your title, it indexes much more. Van Horne says that Google indexes the entire title, but “weights” the words in the title up to the tenth word or 70th character, whichever comes first. All words beyond that are indexed as part of the document.
• Accepted Practice #3: There is little SEO value in headings. Van Horne says there’s no way to prove whether this is true or not. He says attempting to measure this belief to verify its truth would be too complicated. However, he falls on the side of using headings, simply because they stand out on the page and may influence other surrounding ranking signals. Van Horne sums up his article by saying that no SEO rules are set in stone. He suggests keeping track of what works for you and what doesn’t, and to take any “set rule” with a grain of salt.