1. If I simply build a website, it will show up on page one of the search engine results.
   Many people have no idea how search engines work, and consequently don’t understand how websites get listed,  or consider that it may be difficult to get seen. Search engines are “free” advertising, and there is a lot of competition. If the terms you want to rank for are very unique, then chances are there is little traffic for them. If the terms are not unique, then you have a lot of work ahead of you to beat the competition.
2. Just put the right words in the magical meta tags, and my web site  will show up on top
   Meta tags had a lot more weight when the Internet was young. Then webmasters figured out how to game the search engines, and all that stopped. You still need to know how to use meta tags properly on your web pages, but working on meta tags alone will get you nowhere.
3. It’s relatively easy to get on top of the search engine results if you know a few tricks.
   A lot of SEO companies make promises like “guarantee top ranking in 1 week or your money back.” The catch is that you can’t have top ranking for any term you want. Getting on page one of Google for “Used car with red paint in Hayward California” is easy. Getting on page one for the term “Car” is just not going to happen for a small or even medium size business. If a company makes it sound easy, they either don’t know what they are doing, or they are trying to scam you!
4. If I’m on top of the search results for the terms I have chosen, I’ll be getting traffic and making money.  
   Being on top of the search engine results doesn’t make you money in itself. You need targeted traffic, and to convert that traffic in to sales, or whatever your objective for the web site is. If you rank highly for keywords that aren’t searched for, you won’t get traffic. It may sound obvious, but targeting the right keywords is a step that is often overlooked.
5. Once my website is published to the internet, it should show up in the rankings right away.
   It can take from 2 to 4 weeks for your site to show up in the search engine index, and another 4 to 8 weeks for it to be completely crawled and included in a way that you will achieve optimum results. Also, most major search engines factor in such variables as domain name age, so it may take a matter of years before you can break on to page one for competetive keywords, especially if your competition has been around for a while.
6. Submitting a site to many search engines will result in traffic to my website .
   SEO companies that say they will submit your site to 300 search engines are trying to scam you. There are at most 10 major search engines that will bring all of your traffic.You certainly want to submit your website to them, but if you take other necessary steps, such as obtaining incoming links to your
   site, search engine spiders will find your web site even if you don’t submit. And just because the search engine knows about your site, doesn’t mean that it considers it important enough to rank highly in search results.
7. Pay per click (PPC) is an easy and inexpensive way to get search engine traffic quickly.
   When Google Adwords and it’s copiers came out years ago, it was pretty easy and relatively inexpensive to get good traffic. This is no longer true. It is very easy to waste a lot of money trying to learn how to run a pay per click campaign. It may not even be cost effective to run a PPC in certain niches, and it can be very costly to find that out the hard way.
8. The web designer is the expert, and I don’t need to get involved in the web site design process to obtain great search engine performance.
   Web designers are experts in making your Internet business plan a reality. To do that, we need to know as much as possible about your business, products, and customers. It is not uncommon for different departments in one company to use different terms to refer to the same thing. It is also not uncommon for people inside a company to use different terms than do customers when referring to the same thing. Maybe you offer a service, but it isn’t that profitable and would rather not push it. Not communicating this kind of information to your web designer can result in a website that is less effective than it could be.
9. Search engine optimization is something that can be tacked on after a website is built.
   Web design is more than graphic design for web pages. Even more important than making a website look pretty, is creating an information design that will make the website user friendly. Since search engines should always be considered as a user in the design process, that means making the website search engine friendly. And since the information design is the foundation on which the graphic design is built, it necessarily comes before the graphic design.
10. The website alone determines ranking in the search engines.
    External factors are what makes the difference between page 1 and page 100 of the search results, especially for competetive search terms. Search engines want to serve up the most authoritative and important results to their users. They determine the authority of a website based on the number and quality of relevant links pointing to that site. A related misconception people often make is thinking that linking out to many sites will improve your authority. In reality, linking too much to other sites can bleed the authority from your site and hurt your efforts.

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