Let's make one thing clear: you are not the only one who has had the bright idea of getting lots of search engine traffic. Everyone with a website wants to be number-one on Google for their target keywords. If doing well in the search engines were as easy as hitting a “submit” button, everyone would do it, and everyone would be doing equally well in the search engines. Yet that is manifestly untrue. For any search query, there is only one number-one spot and only one site can be there. In fact, there are many sites that never do very well at all.

Search engine submission is never necessary, since search engine spiders (bots) find websites by following links to that site. As Google says on its search engine submission page, “We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web.” ( http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl) They also state that they won't add all sites submitted to them. In fact, as every SEO knows, if you don't have links pointing to your site, you will never get significant search engine traffic no matter how many times you submit. So the submission is essentially pointless: you need links to your site, period, not search engine submission.

Why does Google even offer this pointless search engine submission option? I strongly suspect they know they would be inundated with requests for search engine submission, so it's simply easier to offer a submission option.

Real SEOs hate search engine submission because it's a kind of snake oil that confuses the marketplace. It's kind of like the way counterfeit collector items can hurt the market for the genuine artifacts. When people see this “service” advertised all over the place for $29.95, they have trouble understanding why an actual SEO service costs upwards of a $1,000. The difference is the same as the difference between snake oil and surgery, but the average person, even the average marketing department head, can't tell the difference. So they buy the $29.95 snake oil and curse the field of SEO when it doesn't work.

Meta Tags

Let's make something else clear: if ranking high for a keyword were as easy as adding a snippet of code to the page, everyone would do it, and everyone would be number-one, a logical impossibility. It's the same too-easy principle as with search engine submission.

A long, long time ago, pre-Google, pre-AltaVista, circa 1996—when most websites belonged to universities or hobbyists--search engines like Lycos or Excite would look at a website's meta keyword tags to help classify it. As soon as the web went commercial, businesses started abusing meta keywords by, for instance, inserting terms that had nothing to do with their websites, and even competitors' trademarks. So search engines stopped looking at these tags and never looked back.

The meta description tag is still occasionally used by search engines to provide a description for a webpage in the listings. There is some debate about whether search engines use this tag in ranking a page; however, if they do, they certainly don't weight it any more than the content that's actually on the page, so that it would not provide any advantage. The meta description tag has also frequently been abused with inappropriate keyword stuffing, so many SEOs assume that search engines ignore it when determining ranking.

In short, the basic problem with all meta tags is that, since the average visitor will never see them, webmasters can use them to lie to search engines.

Here are two newer, wackier search engine myths:

* Search frequency. There is actually a company selling a piece of software that searches on a site's domain name repeatedly. Why? The vendors say that it makes the search engines see the site as more important. If you that sounds credible, please, please do a lot more reading on SEO.

* Web traffic. A site's traffic does not currently affect its ranking in the search engines as far as anyone knows. Google has in fact filed patents for incorporating web traffic data in its rankings, but this was either a deliberate red herring to fool SEOs or else the technology hasn't been widely implemented yet. (Presumably, Google would know about web traffic from data from its Google toolbar and its Google web analytics service for webmasters.

In conclusion, just keep in mind a few simple facts of SEO life:

1. SEO success is never as easy as pushing a button.
2. The two most important SEO factors are still the content (words) on the site and the links pointing to it. Everything else is secondary.

Joel Walsh writes extensively on SEO and other web business issues. You can read more of his SEO content, contact him, or inquire about his SEO consulting: http://www.upmarketseo.com

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