Search Engine SubmissionsIn the classic search engine era (late 1990s), search engines had "submission" forms that were part of the "optimization" process. Webmasters & site owners would tag their sites & pages with keywords and submit them to search engines. Shortly after submission, a bot would crawl these resources and include them in its index.
Unfortunately, this process didn't work well enough, submissions were often spammy, and this practice eventually succumbed to crawl-based search engines. Since 2001, search engine submission has been both unnecessary and useless. Search engines have all stated clearly that they rarely use URL "submissions" and that the best practice is to get links from other sites. This will naturally reveal your content to search engines.
You can still find submission pages sometimes (Google's and Bing's are here) but these are relics of a bygone era and don't actually work for modern SEO practices. If you hear an SEO recommending "search engine submission," run, don't walk, to a real SEO. Even if search engines were using submission services to crawl your site, you would have little chance of earning enough link juice to get into their indexes or rank competitively in search queries.
Meta TagsAt one time, meta tags (especially the meta keywords tag) were an important part of the SEO process, much like search engine submission. You would add the keywords you wanted your site to rank for, and your page would appear at the top when users typed those terms. This practice quickly devolved into spam and was eventually de-emphasized by all major search engines as a significant ranking signal.
The title tag (not strictly a meta tag but often used with them) and the meta description tag (which was covered earlier in this guide) are of great importance for best SEO practices. Additionally, the meta robots tag is an important tool for controlling spider access. Still, SEO is not "all about meta tags" – at least, not anymore.
Keyword Stuffing & DensityHave you ever seen a page that looked like spam? It probably looked like this:
"Bob's cheap plumber is the cheapest plumber for all your plumbing needs. Contact us for a cheap plumber before it's too late."
As expected, the density myth in SEO relates to the concept of keyword density used in search engines' relevance & ranking calculations – a mathematical formula that divides the number of times a keyword is used by the word count of a page.
This myth persists even though it has been proven false. Many SEO tools still support the notion that keyword density is an important metric. But it's not. Ignore it and use keywords logically and sensibly. Having 10 extra instances of your keyword on a page is far less impactful than a link from a reputable source that doesn't make you look like a search spammer.
Paid Search Helps Support Organic ResultsPut on your thinking caps, it's time for the most common SEO conspiracy theory: spending money on search engine ads (PPC) boosts your organic SEO rankings.
In all our experience, witnessed or heard of, there has never been proof or even a plausible explanation of this having any effect on organic results. Google, Yahoo! & Bing all have very effective limits in place to explicitly prevent such a crossover.
Advertisers spending tens of millions of dollars each month, especially on Google, have stated that they receive no special access or treatment from the search quality or web spam teams. As long as existing barriers remain and search engines continue to refine this separation, we believe it will remain a myth. However, we have seen anecdotal evidence that buying paid ads for keywords you already rank for can have the benefit of increasing organic click-through rates.
