Big Picture Myth Three – off shelf software that submits a site to thousands of web sites and presents snazzy reports can do it all. This is so inaccurate and nothing can be further from truth – it takes a tremendous amount of labor and time to identify keyword sets (not just words), optimize content for these keywords, submit pages while obeying rules of road and then continually analyzing rankings and tweaking to maintain and drive rankings (web site visibility).

Software can certainly help to automate some facets of process and be used for back end analysis – but you can't expect any application to make job easy, there is too much inherent complexity in processes. And, competition for keyword sets is fierce – as there are an estimated 5-10M registered domains (the numbers vary widely) with 60K new domains being registered every day.

Big Picture Myths Four and Five – Any page listing will help to drive traffic to a web site – this is another misconception. If you are aren't achieving page 1-3 rankings then your wasting a great deal of time and resources – most people never drill down below these pages. Another common mistake is trying to achieve s/e rankings for a specific URL or product – if people know name of a company or product they will find your web site easily, it's a waste of resources to optimize for these specialized terms in 80% of most cases.

There is nothing more important to any page's ranking than title of page. Keep it short. Less than four or five words, if possible. The shorter title, more focused and relevant Google will consider that page to be.

4. Lots of small font on your pages. That's considered spam! In theory, you could use

tags

Just use size 2 or 3 font, and if nothing else, at least you won't get penalized.

5. Invisible keywords on your page. i.e., a whole bunch of white words on a white background, on bottom of your page. Spam again. It's easy for Google spider to pick up, and yes, they will hammer your ratings for it.

Instead, write relevant keywords, high in your page text, and make your most important keywords come out first in Title tags of your HTML page.

Your overall best shot at getting good rankings for your site: Useful content. It's like old saying you heard in school: "If you spent as much time studying as you did cheating, you'd be in top of your class." (I'm sure you never heard that directly, but I think you get point.)

The ultimate fix: There is no traffic-builder like high-quality content. You will find people linking to you without your asking for it, and that will catapult you to top of search engines. Your site's visitors are real people, with a real need you can fill. If you'll use your website to provide them with reliable information, services, or products, it will be as successful as any offline venture.