UKC

Common SEO Myths and What to Do Instead

Updated August 2026: this article replaces an obsolete Flash tutorial with current, accessible guidance.

SEO advice attracts confident claims that are too simple to be useful. Search systems change, competitors improve and every site has a different technical and content history. Treat promises of instant or guaranteed rankings with caution.

Myth: submitting a site guarantees indexing

A sitemap and Search Console can help discovery and diagnosis, but neither guarantees that a URL will be crawled, indexed or ranked. Make important pages valuable, internally linked and technically accessible.

Myth: repeating a keyword improves every page

Use the language customers naturally use, but write for comprehension. Repetitive wording makes a page harder to read and does not replace a complete answer. Cover the topic, intent and important details without forcing a phrase into every sentence.

Myth: more pages or links always means better rankings

Large quantities of thin pages and artificial links can create risk and maintenance work. A smaller set of accurate pages, supported by useful navigation and genuine references, is a stronger foundation.

Measure real outcomes—qualified search visits, completed tasks and enquiries—alongside rankings. Document changes so you can distinguish improvement from seasonality or unrelated search changes.

Further reading: Google’s SEO Starter Guide and people-first content guidance.

How Search Engines Find and Rank Web Pages

Updated August 2026: this article replaces an obsolete Flash tutorial with current, accessible guidance.

Search systems generally work in three broad stages: crawling, indexing and serving results. Understanding the distinction makes technical SEO problems much easier to diagnose.

Crawling

Automated crawlers discover URLs through links, previous visits and sitemap files. They request a page much like a browser. A broken link, server error, robots rule or access restriction can prevent that request from succeeding.

Indexing

After fetching a page, a search engine analyses its text, images, video, canonical signals and relationship to other pages. It may store the page in its index, but successful crawling does not guarantee indexing. Duplicate, low-value or inaccessible content may be excluded.

Serving results

When somebody searches, the engine chooses results it considers relevant and useful for that query and context. Many systems and signals contribute; there is no single setting that determines the order.

Website owners should keep important pages linked from ordinary navigation, return correct HTTP status codes, maintain a clean XML sitemap and monitor Search Console. Investigate the affected stage instead of treating every visibility problem as a “ranking” problem.

Further reading: Google’s explanation of how Search works.

What Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Updated August 2026: this article replaces an obsolete Flash tutorial with current, accessible guidance.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the work of making a website easier for search engines to understand and easier for people to use. Good SEO helps the right audience discover useful pages through unpaid search results. It is not a shortcut or a guarantee of a particular ranking.

What SEO involves

  • Publishing accurate, original content that answers a real question.
  • Giving each page a clear title, heading structure and descriptive links.
  • Making the site fast, secure, mobile-friendly and straightforward to navigate.
  • Ensuring important pages can be crawled and are not accidentally blocked.
  • Using descriptive URLs, image alternative text and structured data where appropriate.

Start with visitors rather than algorithms. A page should make its purpose clear, provide a complete answer and help the reader take the next sensible step. Technical improvements matter, but they cannot turn thin, inaccurate or copied material into a genuinely useful result.

How to measure progress

Use Google Search Console to see which pages are indexed, the searches that generate impressions and clicks, and whether Google reports crawl or page-experience problems. Review trends over weeks and months: search demand, competition and rankings naturally change.

Further reading: Google’s SEO Starter Guide and guidance on helpful, people-first content.

How can I disable mod_security?

We use mod_security to protect your site from hackers and http injection attacks as well as many other protective features.

From time to time, you may come across a script that simply will not work with mod_security enabled, especially scripts that are custom made or uncommon. Usually the error returned is “403 Forbidden” when trying to load a page.

If you find that your script is creating false positives within mod_security then we can disable mod-security for your domain name. Sometimes your domain name alone may trigger false positives, especially if there’s spammy looking text within your domain such as “cheapmedsonline” or “loseweightfast”.

Simply contact the helpdesk and ask for mod_security to be disabled.

How do I change the PHP Mail() from address?

When using the PHP Mail() function you will find that the ‘from’ email address is often an unfriendly looking system email address sometimes even belonging to the root or system user, this can confuse your userbase as well as making it impossible for them to reply to any system messages that you send.

To make this change you first need to decide which email address you would like the from address to represent. This email address must exist on the server where your PHP Mail() function is being called, if the email address you choose does not exist, then your efforts will be wasted.

$result = mail(“to@address.com”, “subject”, “message”, “From: other@address.com\n”, “-fother@address.com”);

Make sure that the other@address.com exists on the server, if it does not, this will not work.

If you have any problems simply contact the Helpdesk for further assistance,

Categories PHP