1. Meta Tags.

The general reasoning behind people or companies still wanting or attempting to use meta tags is: "Meta tags will make all the difference for our web site" or "We have heard or read of companies that their web sites were placed way on top because of meta tags".

In the early days of the Internet, meta tags were originally incorporated in a site as an attempt to better assist webmasters. They were also included to help search engines discover what their site was all about. As you might expect, it didn't take very long that some people found a way to short-circuit the system as it were.

Some actually tried and successfully got around in abusing this technique by writing useless keywords into their meta tags in hopes to trick the search engines to rank them higher. Today, and because of all this abuse, most major search engines, especially Google, are placing less and less importance in the presence or absence of meta tags and their content.

That is not to say they are no good anymore as the new MSN Search places some importance on them so it's always worth spending a little bit of time on them (just in case).

2. Weekly Search Engine Submissions.

Contrary to popular opinion, submitting a website every week or every month to the major search engines will not help your rankings, in fact it will do just the opposite. Once a website is in a search engine's database, it usually won't go away with time.

For all intents and purposes, once a website has been professionally optimised for all its major keywords & key phrases, the site should consistently yield excellent, positive results and will drive targeted visitors into your business. You should be careful of any company or individual that claims otherwise.

It isn't necessary at all to resubmit a website every month, but even if it was, there are simply not "thousands" of search engines that are worth submitting to! In the real world, there are only about five or so major Web search engines and a few good search directories that, as a whole, provide about 98.5% of all Internet search engine results in the world.

Many businesses and large companies are flooded daily with useless spam and emails that claim to offer a monthly submittal service for a small fee. The majority of the search engines that these services plan to submit your site are, for the most part, totally unknown to the search engine community.

So what do you get in return for paying the monthly charges? Well less money in your bank account, plus knowing that your site will NOT be visible by the important search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. We have even heard rumours that Google actually downgrades a site when resubmitted every week.

If you really want your site to yield the best ROI (Return on Investment), then invest in a quality SEO program by a reputable company.

3. Search Engine Optimization Experts (SEO) are too expensive!

Search Engine Positioning and optimisation (SEO) is generally much less expensive than PPC (Pay-for-Click) programs and less costly than any other marketing campaign you can conduct, both online or offline. It usually costs much less than direct mail, banner ads, print ads, etc.

Confusion may arise because pricing isn’t consistent at all in online advertising. Some have price tags in the five or six figure range, others have costs of just a few hundred or a thousand pounds.

However, most cost a significant amount. Many businesses may not have the financial resources to go ahead in such a program. The much less expensive and better way to do it is with a good, serious and professional Web site positioning and optimisation service available from specialised SEO firms.

For a lot less money than any PPC offering, a professional SEO program can bring you a lot higher ROI (Return on Investment). That means a fairly smaller investment could significantly raise your targeted site traffic by anywhere from 40% to 95% or in most cases even higher.

Furthermore, remember that we are talking about targeted traffic here. First, there is a big difference between targeted traffic coming from major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN.

If you still think that SEO experts and the optimization programs they run are still too expensive, think for a minute the large amount of cash being spent daily by large multi-national corporations on TV advertising, radio "spots" and newspapers. Just a thirty second spot on a large TV sports special such as the FA Cup Final can easily run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The irony is, do you really think it is quality, trageted traffic? When people go on Google or Yahoo, they have a clear idea of what it is they are looking for. They want to find it fast, without any hassles. And they are looking for quality search results. The only way your web site will be on top of SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) is to have it professionally optimized by an expert team that truly understands SEO.

The old adage that “Time is Money” also holds true in professional SEO. When all is considered, an investment with a professional SEO company might be the best solution to many if not the majority of companies and businesses. If it were all so easy, everybody would be SEO’s and the world would probably run out of sites to optimize!

4. We can do our SEO in house, better and cheaper - no problem at all, it's easy!

This is an SEO myth we hear a lot. As with so many things today, from the start, it sure looks simple. Some think that a bit of "tweaking" with a few meta tags and inserting a keyword or a key phrase in the title tag amounts to great SEO optimisation!

To be really successful, a company that wishes to do its own "in house" optimisation needs to get prepared for a lot more than that. You might be able to succeed "on your own" if you would have an in-house expert that really knows everything about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and has access to all the expensive and specialised technical equipment needed to do a professional, first rate job.

Professional website optimisation and positioning used to be fairly easy, but not anymore. To make matters worse, most major search engine today constantly adjust or make important changes to their search algorithm, further complicating matters for your would-be "in house" SEO.

Some techniques that were ok (such as resubmitting your site to search engines repeatedly, on a regular basis) now get you in trouble as you will be viewed as a "spammer" and could cost you your rankings! To even begin to learn just the basics of what works, you would have to memorize about 1000 pages of complex technical instructions. SEO is a science as well as an art.

To keep up with the daily changes in the world of search engines, you'll need to read another 200 - 300 pages a month just to keep abreast of all the latest changes. You will also have to read all the daily news in the field of search engines, as there is not a single day that goes by without seeing major changes, or buyouts, or mergers or new and powerful search technology being developed at one particular search engine.

Additionally, you need to get a lot of hands-on, practical experience along the way. Chances are your "in-house expert" already has a full-time job too, so he or she isn't doing a good enough job of handling this as well.