Superstition: All you need to do to improve your page ranking is to place keywords in the meta tags for your page.

Fact: Just putting keywords in the keyword meta tag is not enough, there must also be keywords in the page copy otherwise it could be considered spam depending on the search engine. Anything considered spam can actually hurt your rankings not improve them.

Superstition: Hiding text or links which contain your keywords will improve your search engine rankings.

Fact: While this was once both common practice and a good way to get your site noticed, it is now considered too be spamming and can get your website penalized, even banned from search engine results if you are caught doing this.

Superstition: The more reciprocal links you have to other websites, the better your Google page ranking will be.

Fact: Not necessarily so. If you are linked with some pages, such as FFA pages and link farms, his can make your ranking lower, not higher. What you should try to have is inbound links from sites which have quality content relevant to your site. While no one is exactly sure how Google calculates this, relevant links seem to be given far more weight.

Superstition: Most sites are optimized. What chance do I have of standing out?

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: 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: You don’t need a robots.txt file or a sitemap.

Fact: Search engine bots look for the robots.txt file to let them know if they are allowed to index the domain and what they can crawl. When you use a site map, search bots will follow every link on it. This gets your website completely indexed. Both the sitemap and robots.txt file need to be in your root 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.