Driving traffic to your site with Search engine Optimisation is one of the most reliable yet oldest methods around. Since your visitors are highly targeted, they visit your site and take action. And the best part is that it doesn’t cost you a penny to get this traffic. However, many people still don’t know how to rank their site well in the SERPs and have been left far behind. Due to the meteoric rise to “fame” of Search engine Optimisation, many fantasies have appeared and are being touted as fact, making it difficult for people to get a good grasp of how search engines actually operate. Making them effective for you requires a very good grasp of the different Search engine Optimisation elements and how they interact with each other. We will be debunking some of those myths in this article and you need to know them if you want to have a chance at making Search engine Optimisation work for you.

Optimizing long tail keywords is essential if you want to rank highly for them. This is a myth that has been spread far and wide over the past few years. Actually, it’s not necessary to optimize long tail keywords because these are low competition words and phrases that don’t get many searches. Ranking highly for long tail keywords is not difficult. As long as you put these keywords into your content, you can rank for them, though this is not optimization. There’s nothing else you need to do. You don’t have to do heavy duty optimization for these keywords, which makes it obvious that you should target them.

Another story you need to know about when you are conducting Search engine Optimisation on your site is that failing to meet Google’s guidelines will not result in you being banned. This is because the rules Google has created are simply good sense. It’s not compulsory for you to study them if you are certain you are in the right. Just make sure you’re not doing anything the search engines would think is direct spamming/cheating. But yes, go through these Guidelines once because they keep updating and it will help you with gathering knowledge.

Another concept that is simply a myth is that if you buy incoming links from relevant websites your site will be banned. The truth is that Google certainly doesn’t want you buying links in order to influence the rank of your site and they wouldn’t consider them as valid links if they knew they had been paid for but they usually don’t know this. Even if they discover that these are paid links, they would simply ignore the existence of the links. It doesn’t make sense for them to ban a site completely just because it advertised its link on other websites. You need to remember that the same link building regulations apply when you purchase external links. Therefore whether you are buying links or building them naturally, make sure they always come from relevant sites.

Even though these stories are quite widespread you shouldn’t let them interfere with your Search engine Optimisation efforts. You must be aware of the truth so that you can focus your efforts in the correct direction when you start marketing sites with the search engines.