D'oh! Disadvantage me. I scrolled up to get the author's name and somehow came back down with John's. For the record, I should've said Paul. Sorry about that!

Mark, that's a good point about #8.

I'm confused, though… In this post, we showed how 4 of the myths in John's article are actually true. You commented on ChurchCrunch "Paul — thanks for posting your rebuttal. I was shaking my head at a few of these and I like the alternative views you’ve offered." and in your comment you didn't disagree with any of our analysis in this post. So, what's up with the "advantage, John" comment.

For #8 about old pages, you can also look at analytics to see how and why people are ending up on that page. In the case of a popular but expired event that isn't going to be repeated, there may be value in keeping it there to offer a bit of historical perspective. (Was the senior citizen hot dog eating contest in 2007 or 2008? And where was it held?) If traffic is getting there, there's either some interest or it's linked elsewhere on your site in a way that's drawing attention.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by OurChurchDotCom: Putting the Truth-O-Meter to (@human3rror’s) 10 SEO Myths http://bit.ly/bt10cc…

Thanks. I enjoyed your article as well. There are certainly a lot of myths out there that need to be addressed.

Our best source on the importance of keywords in the page text and h tags is…
https://marketing.ourchurch.com/marketing-clients….

…the scores of SEO clients we gotten top 10 rankings using those techniques.

But for those who would like a 3rd party source…
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-fact…

Rather than keyword density I should probably have used the term “term weight”. Just to be clear, we don't believe there is a specific density to aim for, but using keywords in the text helps and so does using them in the h tags. Keywords in the h1 tag and first 50-100 words on the page are considered the #4, #7, and #8 most important on page ranking factors in that source.

Thanks for clarifying the myth about the dashes in the domain. Sounds like we both agree keywords in the domain name are a factor. Hyphens, however, are an effective way of separating the keywords in a domain name, according to Matt Cutts:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscor…

It is an older post, but it still holds true from other comments I've heard from him with the exception that underscores now are treated the same as hyphens.

your point on #2 is not accurately reflecting what my myth was about. it was about dashes, not keywords.