Superstition: Just putting keywords in the keyword meta tag will get the page good ranking when that keyword is searched.

Fact: This is not enough by itself; there have to be keywords within the page itself (i.e.in the copy). If you merely have keywords in your meta tags, search engines may consider it to be spam and ignore your site, hurting your rankings!

Superstition: You can get your page ranked higher with hidden links or text in a page .

Fact: Keyword stuffing, as it’s sometimes called, and/or hidden links in the page can get your website banned or penalized if uncovered. Many search engines consider it spamming. In the early days of search engine advertising it was effective but it’s time has past.

Superstition: The more reciprocal links you have with other sites, the better your own search engine ranking will be.

Fact: Having your website linked to the wrong pages; for instance, link farms and FFA pages can negatively affect your ranking. What you want is inbound links from quality websites. No one is exactly sure how Google determines PR with these links; one inbound link which is relevant to your site have much more value for your page ranking than do lots of irrelevant links to (or from) your site.

Superstition: Most sites are already optimized. Does this even give me a chance?

Fact: Studies show that up to 60% of all websites are not properly optimized to rank high in search engines. The nature of search engines makes it difficult for web designers to properly optimize web pages for their clients. Always discuss optimization with your web designer to determine what services are included in the project.

Superstition: The more times you repeat the keyword in the page, the higher it will rank.

Fact: All the search engines use different algorithms for ranking. They all claim keyword density is important, but they don’t say what the proper density is. If your keyword density is too high or too low you will be penalized. Some so-called experts say the keyword density should be 3%, some say as high as 6%. No one really knows.

Superstition: Once your site in indexed by the search engines changes to it will have little effect.

Fact: The exact opposite is true. You should constantly be updating your website. Simple things like fixing broken links can enhance your positions in the search results. Search engines won’t continue to spider your site if they run into a number of broken links. Content is king. Constantly improving your content helps the search engines when spidering your website. The easier you make it for the search engines with solid content the better your link positioning will be. By removing outdated material with routine maintenance and updating your pages regularly, you are letting the search bots and crawlers know to come back and re-crawl your site regularily for changes.

Superstition: Robots.txt file and sitemaps aren’t necessary.

Fact: Search engine bots look for the robots.txt file first, since this file tells them what they are allowed to index and what to crawl while on your site. A site map also has the advantage that the search bots will follow each link therein. This is a way to ensure that your site is comprehensively indexed. These two files (sitemap and robots.txt) should be placed in the root level directory of your domain.

Superstition: Search engines cannot index pages with Flash; using Flash on your page will lead to search engines penalizing your site.

Fact:While search engines do not index the Flash movie itself, they will index the text of the movie (you need to specify Flash text in your HTML) along with the rest of your page. Flash has no effect on the site itself in terms of indexing and does not keep your site from being crawled either. What search engines don’t like is websites which automatically re-direct, including Flash pages which do this. It’s the redirection, not the Flash which is the problem here.