Here we are going to discuss some Search Engine Optimization Myths, these are the usual claims like guaranteed rankings and permanent rankings. Let us deal with that part right here and now: there is no such thing as a guaranteed ranking and certainly no such thing as a permanent ranking, unless you keep optimizing your site from time to time and that is an ongoing process, not one to be handled on a yearly basis. A guaranteed ranking is essentially an insurance policy - an SEO company who makes a guarantee is essentially charging you enough that they can refund the occasional customer whose site does not get ranked high enough fast enough.



Secondly, there are the techniques that used to make an impact on the search engine rankings in the simpler days, or those that are just plainly unethical ways of gaining in ranks; which, incidentally, are ones that the search engines have their guard up against.

Meta Tags - once used for assisting webmasters, meta tags were a good way for search engines to find relevant content. As always though, people improvised and started using irrelevant keywords in the Meta tags to misguide search engines. Meta tags have since become a SEO myth that some people still concentrate on; others that are up to date in the business understand it to be a story of the days gone by.

Another SEO Myth is the use of multiple domain names. While some people believe the use of multiple domain names will get them higher rankings, the easiest way to find out if it works is to look at the successful sites: Ebay, Amazon, and even GameSpot, rank high in the search engines in their respective domains, yet they have hundreds of pages worth of content. If it was so useful to have multiple domain names, why would those sites ignore the brilliant idea and not split their content into different sites? The fact of the matter is that by splitting content you can limit the potential of your website while by creating mirror sites, you are very likely to be ignored by the search engines altogether. The process also takes longer to optimize each site and build reasonable, and relevant, link exchange programs and that is when we totally ignore the fact that you pay 10-15 times extra to get the same number of mirror sites created and hosted.

Doorway and gateway pages are result pages created by so called SEO experts who use automated programs to create optimized pages for your site that are Search Engine specific. These result pages do not link to your site or add informational value to your content, they are supposedly there to get your rankings up. Of course, these result pages are different for each search engine and that leads us to the question, how do you optimize a page for Alta-Vista and Google at the same time if, theoretically and most probably, their requirement for keyword density is different? The answer is simple, you don't. The use of gateway or doorway pages was a practice that Alta-Vista banned from its rankings back in 2001, and Google does not allow it either. It is an unethical practice that has nothing to do with the creation of good content which is the end aim of all search engine searches.

Resubmitting the site to the search engines every week is another one of the myths that are not likely to get you any results. Why would it? The companies that offer services such as this usually offer to submit to numerous search engines every week. But who needs submitting the sites to all those search engines? The commonly used search engines are barely a dozen and those are the ones that matter because people just do not use the rest often enough to pay attention to them. Additionally, resubmission is an excessive practice, a waste of time since the search engine already has your site listed, and so multiple resubmissions can be termed spamming, and another unethical practice that Google, for one, does not appreciate. In fact, there is a theory that they actually downgrade such sites - would you pay to downgrade your site for perhaps the most widely used search engine? I wouldn't.