Much has been written about search engine optimization (SEO) techniques by numerous different search engine experts, so it’s only natural that many of these tenacious myths occur at regular intervals.  Here are 5 misconceptions I have noticed with pretty high frequency:
 
1. Submitting my Website to search engines will bring me visitors.
Submitting your Website to search engines doesn’t automatically bring visitors to your site.  If your Website isn’t optimized for the search engines, chances are that it won’t be listed at all, and if it is, it’s probably somewhere at position 4,379 and beyond. You must make sure that your Website is optimized for your important keywords before submitting it to search engines.  Otherwise, you’re wasting your precious time and money.

2. I must submit my Website to 1,500 search engines.
There are only about 5 important international search engines and the same amount of country specific search engines that will bring you 99% of your search engine visitors.  Therefore, it’s utterly pointless to submit your site to 1,500 “search engines”.  Most of these sites aren’t search engines at all but rather free for all link pages that do nothing more than add your email address to a spam list.  Focus on the major search engines that Web surfers actually frequent.

Apart from that, if your Website has many incoming links, you don’t have to submit it at all.  Search engines are able to find your site automatically through the links and they’ll give it a higher value than a directly submitted page because other people linked to it.

3. META tags will improve my search engine ranking.
Most search engines don’t use the META Keywords tag anymore to determine the ranking of a Website because they’ve been abused too much in the past with the purpose of tricking search engines.  But the META Description tag is still useful because its description will be displayed on the query result page of some search engines.  Adding any other META tags like the META Author tag, the META Copyright tag, or the META Language tag means nothing to the major search engines so it isn’t worth your time.

4. Cloaking or doorway pages will get me a high ranking.
Techniques such as using hidden content, cloaking or doorway pages used to work for some time and some techniques might still work on some engines.  Sooner or later though, all major search engines will recognize these techniques as spam.  As soon as they find out that you’re trying to trick them, your site will likely get in trouble and may possibly be banned for a long, long time.

5. Search engine optimization is not as good as traditional advertising.
Actually, the opposite is true.  People who find your site through search engines are usually active and ready to buy.  Search engine traffic is very qualified because your visitors performed searches with a purpose when they found your site.  Search engine leads can be more targeted and more valuable than traditional media advertising methods. 

If done correctly, optimizing your site for high search engine rankings is perhaps the most cost-effective advertising method for your business.  Therefore it’s essential to make sure that your site is optimized for search engines and that it has many incoming links.
If your Website is good in these two areas, you’ll get many targeted visitors from search engines and other web sites without submitting your site to the search engines even once.