Myth: It's All about Meta Tags and Submissions:
This is the most pervasive and harmful myth of all, and one held by many Web designers and developers. All you need to do, many believe, is code your pages with the right meta tags - KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION, and things like REVISIT-AFTER and CLASSIFICATION - and then submit your site to the search engines. I know Web designers who tell their clients that they are search engine experts, then follow nothing more than this procedure.

It's completely wrong for various reasons. Most meta tags aren't particularly important or aren't used by the search engines at all. Without keywords in the page content, the search engines won't index what you need them to index.:

Myth: Web Designers and Developers Understand Search Engines:
I’m a geek. I’ve worked in software development for over 20 years; I still work closely with software developers (these days mostly Web-software developers); I build Web sites for my clients (so I work with developers and designers on these sites); my friends are developers and designers . . and I’m telling you now that most developers and designers do not know the search engines to any great degree.
Most Web-development companies these days tell their clients that they know how to handle the search engines, and even that they are experts.

In most cases, that’s simply not true, any more than it’s true that I’m an expert in neurosurgery. This makes it very hard for business owners when they hire a Web-development team, of course, though perhaps this book will help. It will give you an idea of the sorts of questions you should ask your developers to figure out if they really do understand search engine requirements.

Myth: Multiple Submissions Improve Your Search Position:
As far as the major search engines go, multiple submissions, even automated submissions, don’t help. Someone recently told me that he was sure it did help, because his position improved in, for instance, the Open Directory Project when he frequently resubmitted. This is completely wrong — in the case of the Open Directory Project, there’s no way it could possibly help, as they don’t accept automated submissions anyway, and all entries have to be reviewed by a human editor.

As you just read, submitting to the search engines — requesting that they index your pages — often doesn’t get your page indexed anyway. Far more important is a link campaign to get plenty of links to your site. Multiple submissions to smaller search engines may help, it’s true. But it won’t help with the major systems.

Mistake: You Don’t Know Your Keywords:
This is also a major problem — the vast majority of Web sites are created without the site owners or developers really knowing what keywords are important. (That’s okay, perhaps, because most sites are built without any idea of using keywords in the content anyway.) At best, the keywords have been guessed. At worst — the majority of the cases — nobody’s thought of the keywords at all.

Don’t guess at your keywords. Do a proper keyword analysis. I can almost guarantee two things will happen. You will find that some of your guesses were wrong — people aren’t often using some of the phrases you thought would be common. And you’ll also discover very important phrases you had no idea about.

Mistake: Too Many Pages with Database Parameters and Session IDs:
This is a surprisingly common problem. Many, many sites (in particular sites built by big companies with large development teams) are created these days in such a manner that the search engines won’t read them. Search engines don’t like database parameters or session IDs in a URL.

My favorite example used to be CarToys.com, a large chain of electronics stores. This site had thousands of products, but fewer than 100 pages indexed by Google, and most of those were Adobe Acrobat files or pop-up ads (“Free Shipping!”), or links to dynamic pages that wouldn’t appear when a searcher clicked a link in the search results. Luckily for CarToys.com, someone at the company figured it all out, and fixed the problem. Google now indexes over 27,000 pages on this site.

Mistake: Building the Site and Then Bringing in the SEO Expert:
Most companies approach search engine optimization as an afterthought. They build their Web site, and then think, “Right, time to get people to the site.” You really shouldn’t begin a site until you have considered all the different ways you are going to create traffic to the site. That’s like starting to build a road without knowing where it needs to go; if you’re not careful, you’ll get halfway there and realize “there” is in another direction.
In particular, though, you shouldn ’t start building a Web site without an understanding of search engines. Most major Web sites these days are built by teams of developers who have little understanding of search engine issues. These sites are launched, and then someone decides to hire a search engine consultant. And the search engine consultant discovers all sorts of unnecessary problems.

Good business for the consultant; expensive fixes for the site owner. In addition, Web developers usually don’t enjoy working with search marketing experts. They think that all the search engine experts want to do is make the site ugly or remove the dynamism. This is furthest from the truth, and a Web developer who refuses to work with an SEO expert may just be worried for his or her job.

Myth: $25 Can Get Your Site a #1 Position:
There’s a lot of background noise in the search engine business; companies claiming to be able to get your site into thousands of search engines, and rank your site well, for $25 a month . . . or a $50 flat fee . . . or $75 a month . . . or whatever.
The truth is that it’s more complicated than that, and most people I’ve spoken to who have used such services have been very disappointed. They often don’t get into the major search engines at all, and even if they get included in the index, they don’t rank well. Search engine ranking is sometimes very easy — but other times it’s complicated, time consuming, and tedious. Most of the offers you’ll see streaming into your Inbox in spam e-mail messages, or displayed in banner ads on the Web, are not going to work.

Myth: Google Partners Get You #1 Positions:
If you receive a spam e-mail telling you that the sender has a “special arrangement” with Google and can get you a #1 position within hours or days, delete it . . . it’s nonsense, a scam. It’s true that you can buy a top position on Google through its AdWords PPC program, though you’ll be bidding against your competitors. But this scam refers to something different, that Google has a special program that allows certain privileged companies to sell top positions in the organic-search results.Don’t believe it; it’s nonsense.

Myth: Bad Links to Your Site Will Hurt Its Position:
Another common myth is that getting links to your site from “bad neighborhoods” such as link farms or Web sites unrelated to your site’s theme will hurt your search engine position. This isn’t exactly so. It won’t help, but it won’t hurt, either, unless it is obvious that you are actively interacting with link farms or Free For All (FFA) link pages.
If bad links did hurt your site, you could assassinate your competition by linking to their sites from every lousy link farm and FFA you could find. So the search engines can’t use such links to downgrade your site.

Mistake: Your Pages Are “Empty”
This one is a huge problem for many companies; the pages have nothing much for the search engines to index. In some cases, the pages have little or no text that a search engine can read because the words on the page are embedded into images. In other cases, all the words may be real text, but there are very few words . . . and what words there are, are not the right keywords.

Remember, search engines like — need — content. And to a search engine, content means text that it can read and index. And whenever you provide text to a search engine, it should be the text that does the most for you, text that will help you be found in the search results. And the more content, the better.

Myth: Pay Per Click Is Where It’s At
Pay per click can be a very important part of a Web site’s marketing strategy. It’s reliable, predictable, and relatively easy to work with. But it’s not the only thing you should be doing. In fact, many companies cannot use PPC because the clicks are too expensive for their particular business model (and click prices are likely to keep rising as search marketing continues to be the hot Internet marketing topic).

The growth in PPC has been partly caused by the lack of search engine optimization
knowledge. Companies build a site without thinking about the search engines, and then don’t hire professional expertise to help them get search engine traffic, so they fall back on PPC. Many companies are now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on PPC; they could complement their PPC campaigns with natural search engine traffic for a small fraction of that cost.