• Search engine technology is moving too fast: I can’t keep up!
• Submitting my website to the search engines takes forever
• SEO is dangerous and can get my sites taken off the search engines
• Keywords and description META tags are the most important part of SEO
• I’ll see results from SEO Quickly

We often hear and read about these myths so I will offer my views below:

Search engine technology is moving too fast: I can’t keep up!
Search engines need to constantly evolve and improve to provide users with the content they need and to stay ahead of the competition. This isn’t something to fear but to embrace. If you are providing good, solid content that users want to read you can rest assured that the search engines want to find you.

Submitting my website to the search engines takes forever
If you have a brand new website it could take a while to appear if you wait for the site to be found by the crawlers but there are things you can do. You can tell the search engine companies whether it be Google, Bing or Yahoo about your site and they will simply crawl it at the next opportunity.

SEO is dangerous and can get my sites taken off the search engines
SEO is not dangerous and you will only be removed from the site should you try and trick the search engines. Make sure you stay away from these “Black Hat” techniques and you should be OK:

• Gateway pages – Creating optimised pages towards a specific search term and immediately directing a user away from that page on entry
• Keyword stuffing – Using keywords too much or that are not relevant to your site in order to trick the search engine
• Hidden content – Hiding content behind other elements that the user cannot see but the search engine bots can.

Keywords and description META tags are the most important part of SEO
This is perhaps the most common mis-conception. Some years ago this would have been true but due to better algorithms and the number of people trying to trick the search engines the keyword and description tags are now more or less defunct. Search engines will have a better idea about which search terms your site is relevant too by the content and not by you telling it.

I’ll see results from SEO quickly
Due to the sheer size and number of sites on the web getting noticed will take time. If done well however the time taken to achieve this will be well worth it.

With this in mind what does work?

Obviously there are too many aspects I could go into but here a few to think about:

• Realistic search terms – think who your customers are and what phrases they may use to find you. It is much more likely that someone using a concise search term will turn into a customer.
• Clear navigation and machine readable content – make sure your site is easy to navigate, can be read and is reflected in the sitemap
• Off-site links – Try and get links to your site on relevant, trusted websites.

This is much more than a simple re-branding exercise, however. Bing is seen by many as the last roll of the dice for Microsoft. Their flagship software product, Windows Vista, was several years late and received a bad press about sluggish performance, even on high-performance PCs. Other key areas of Microsoft’s business have come under attack, too. Internet Explorer once held over 80% of the browser market, now, it’s closer to 40%. Free and open source alternatives are gaining popularity.

Worst of all for Microsoft however, is the dominance of Google. It bestrides the search engine sector like a colossus. Of all searches on the web, 60% are performed on Google and only 6% on Microsoft websites. Google has also has made in-roads into another of Microsoft’s flagship products, Office, with a web-based alternative: Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

The fact that bing is now the default selected search engine for anyone using a Microsoft product or website means that it will gain a similarly default market share, though whether it can build on this to overtake Google is open to debate.

When Microsoft announced its “Windows Live” strategy, it was major change of strategy. Rather than just concentrating on desktop software, Microsoft would seek to secure its future on the web, eventually with a view to moving its desktop software there. However, it needs a concrete market share as a platform to do this and with Windows Live Search falling short of the mark and a failed attempt to buy market share by taking over Yahoo!, bing is seen by many as a last, some might say, desperate shot for Microsoft to take any kind of stake in the future of the web.