You heard it right. We’re giving away tickets to the WordCamp of your choice. No strings attached. In an attempt for us to give back to the awesome WordPress community that you guys make up, we want to send three lucky winners to WordCamp at no charge! You tell us which WordCamp you want to go to and we’ll get you one admission ticket, on us. There is absolutely no purchase necessary and you do not need to be one of our many happy customers to participate.

So how do you win?

It’s easy. Simply Tweet about this giveaway up to once a day (make sure you include @MaintainWP in your tweet), sign up for our newsletter (on the right) or comment right here on this page. We will keep this up until March 27th and announce three winners on that date. Until then, you can Tweet once a day, or post a comment here, once.

It’s not every day that we wright a post about SEO (or any post for that matter) but dealing with SEO-conscious clients has made us realize the amount of misconceptions floating around out there. That being said, this is our attempt to set the record straight.

Meta Tags and Keywords

It’s not uncommon at all that we have clients request that we bombard their header section with a ton of meta keywords. Not long ago, the meta keywords attribute played a huge role in SEO, but these days, that’s far from the truth. Google is on the record saying that they no longer pay attention to meta keywords tag, thus making the keyword stuffing official outdated.  This method was phased out mainly because of the abuse it underwent by people including irreverent or misleading keywords to lure unsuspected web surfers to their pages. This also applies to general keyword stuffing around pages. Years ago if you loaded up a page with tons of keywords that would hep you in the area of SEO greatly. People used to often (And actually still do) hide text by changing the color so it blends into the background color of the site, and then just load it up with keywords. It used to be a great way to trick the search engines, but today not only is it annoying, it doesn’t work. Since the era of keyword stuffing search engine’s algorithms have become much more complex. Let’s be honest, if you care about SEO and you care about your visitors, stop loading up pages with keywords and focus more on accurate content.

Spamming

Got Spam? We bet you do. It’s far from rare that we see robots and malicious web users aggressively placing their links in comment forms around the web. If you’re a blog owner chances are you know exactly what we’re talking about. Not only does this tactic not work, it’s very annoying… So please just STOP. Any way, Google has addressed this issue by assigning the “nofollow” link tag to blog comment links. That greatly devalues the links within blog comment areas.

Submitting Your Site

Search engine submission is not necessary. Google will find you. In fact, Google’s ability to search out new sites is so advanced there’s really nothing needed on your part to get found. Getting inbound links will help the process and is much more effective than submitting your site. Try it out; toss a link on Facebook or Twitter.