Search Engine optimization is a legitimate industry, and a good SEO campaign is a wonderful addition to any marketing plan. However, there are some common misconceptions that often crop up. The ensuing confusion often causes problems.

Sometimes these problems are minor — you think you have done a good job SEOing your site (or you have been told it has been done,) but you’re still unlisted and invisible to searchers. Other times, SEO misconceptions leave openings for less than savory characters to peddle snake oil in the guise of SEO. In these unfortunate cases, webmasters end up getting ripped off, and occasionally sites end up getting banned or penalized by the search engines.

In order to clear the waters, I’ve decided to write a blog post n the most common and potentially harmful SEO misconceptions.

My web designer optimized my site when he built it.

Anyone can say that they know how to optimize a website for the search engines. However, optimization methods are not typically taught in programming and design classes.

Most of the time, web developers don’t really know a lot about what the search engines care about. There are a few quick things that are so basic to optimization that anyone who claims to have optimized a website should have done them.

• Title Tags The title tag of every page should be unique and include keywords used frequently on that page.
• Meta Information Even if the web designer didn’t fill in these informative code snippets, they shoudl still exist and be ready to be optimized.
• Sitemap A site map containing links to every single web page should be at the bottom of the home page to aid the search engines in their indexing.
• SEO friendly URLS URLs should contain fewer than three parameters and also automatically include keywords from the page. A typical default is to include part of the Title in the URL</li

If any of these very basic elements are missing from your “search engine optimized” website, be aware that you will need further optimization if your site is to perform as you expect.

Someone has submitted my site to 3000 (300,100, etc.) search engines

Unfortunately, if you’ve paid for this service, you’v ebeen duped. Although submitting your website manually to the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) is advisable, it’s not actually necessary if you use good SEO practices and garner inbound links. The search engines should be abelt to find your site through inbound links and index it all on their own.

Additionally, Google itself currently has about 63% of the search market share followed by Yahoo at around 20%. Bing comes in third with about 8.2%. That means that between those three search behemoths, 91% of search is spoken for. Even if there were 3000 search engines out there, it’s only worht while to worry about the top three.

Seo is Cheap.

While SEO has the highest return on investment of any internet marketing medium, quality work rarely comes cheap. Search engine optimization the RIGHT way is a laborious, time consuming process. Time costs money.

However, the alternatives are equally as expensive. On one hand, you can hire a low-cost, cut-rate SEO consultant or firm to increase your online visibility and raise traffic, but you’re risking getting your site banned by Google if they use nefarious practices.

On the other hand, you can opt out of optimization all together. However, this will keep you from being visible to searchers and even if you have an amazing website, it’s unlikely that anyone will see it (especially if you are in a highly competitive industry.)

SEOs can guarantee rankings

This is absolutely untrue. Although good quality SEO returns excellent and long-lasing results most of the time, there is no guarantee that a site will do well or come in first in Google or anything.

The search engines themselves are the only ones who decide the relevance of websites to search terms. Search engine optimizers know how to make a search engine like a page, but they don’t actually control the rankings at all themselves. Only someone with low ethics would claim to be able to guarantee something over which they have no control.

After I optimize my site, I’m done.

Though the results of a well executed SEO campaign are relatively stable and long lasting, rankings will begin to fall after a period of no upkeep. Search engine optimization is a process, not a finite task. Inbound links must constantly be refreshed, web pages must be revamped, popular keywords change with time, Search Engines change their requirements and new technologies and methods are always available to take advantage of. These are things that SEOs in the industry are aware of and can keep track of for you. Generally, there is an initial period of intense optimization followed by standard upkeep.

White hat vs. black hat

The search engines may not give away their secret algorithms, but they’re pretty clear on the type of optimization they see as worthwhile and helpful, and the kind that tries to game the system and falsely promote sites. In the SEO industry, ethical optimization efforts are referred to as “white hat” and efforts geared towards fooling the search engines or falsely promoting a site are referred to as “black hat.”

White hat efforts are safe and will never harm your website’s standing in the search engines. Black hat techniques can be incredibly harmful if the website utilizing them is caught. You may think that the Search engines won’t notice if your site hides some text or cloaks content, or gets inbound links from dubious sources and you might be right. However, remember that your competitors can clearly see that and they will certainly report you to the search engines. The more competitive your industry is, the more important using white had techniques is.

Knowledge is power.

Deciding who will SEO your site is an incredibly important decision because a bad job can result in disaster. Do a little research before you decide who you’ll have do the work for you. If you decide to do some optimization yourself, be really careful and make sure you’re familiar with the Search Engines best practices. SEO can be an incredibly rewarding venture.

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