Fact: If only it was this easy, everyone would have a perfectly optimized website. There must be keywords in the copy on the page, not just in your meta tags. In fact, if keywords only appear there, search engines are likely to consider it spam and penalize your site.

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 to other sites you have, the higher your Google page rank goes.

Fact: Just having your website linked to obvious FFA or link farms, could penalize your ranking. The idea is to get quality inbound links from related sites. Although no one really knows how Google factors the PR ranking with search results related inbound links seem to have a greater PR value than a million unrelated links to or from your site.

Superstition: Most sites are optimized. What chance do I have to succeed?

Fact: According to some studies 60% of all websites aren't optimized correctly to rank high in the major search engines. Because of the very nature and volatility of search engine algorithms only a small percentage of web designers optimize the pages they build for their clients. When getting your website built make sure you discuss optimization with your web designer and find out exactly what services are included in your project.

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

Fact: Search engines use their own standards to decide which pages will rank well. Keyword density is important and we all know this but what we don't know is what the target keyword density is for SEO. Some say 3%, others 6%; no one knows with any certainty, other than that too many or too few keywords will get your page penalized in the rankings.

Superstition: Once your site is indexed by search engines, changes made to your site will not affect your ranking.

Fact: The opposite is true. In fact, you must update your website as often as you can manage to do so. Even fixing a broken link can help you out here - search engines will stop sending spiders if they keep running into broken links on your site. Updating and changing you content will ensure regular visits form the search engines bots.

Superstition: Robots.txt file and sitemaps aren't needed.

Fact: Search engine bots look for the robots.txt and your sitemap as soon as they get to your site. These files tell the bots what to look at on your site and any link in your sitemap will be crawled. You should definitely have both of these files; they should be placed into the root directory of your domain these files can be a big help in getting a better page ranking.

Superstition: Search engines can't index a website which contains Flash. Using Flash on your site is bad for your search engine ranking.

Fact: It's true that search engines do not index Flash movies, but will index the Flash text (specify Flash text in your HTML), along with the rest of your site's content. What the search engines are penalizing you for is Flash which automatically redirects. It's the redirection, not the Flash which is the issue on these pages.