The Web is can be extremely unforgiving market place and with competition at a global level, the fight for a high search engine ranking gets all the more intense. Marketing for any online business eventually becomes a fight for a good placement on Google, Yahoo! or any of the top search engines. After all, most surfers begin browsing with a search engine, making search engine optimization essential for all e-businesses. The logic is simple - higher rankings translate to increased traffic with results in higher exposure and sales. SEO remains the number one priority of any online marketing strategy.

SEO techniques are tried and tested methods employed by professionals who have garnered years of experience in web development, IT and Internet-related fields. There are no free lunches in the SEO world! Most "tips and tricks" posted online have been used and abused by web designers everywhere. In addition, some SEO firms offer services that are in blatant violation to search engine polices. These forbidden practices, dubbed black hat SEO, can often result in the death knell for their clients - a ban from a major search engine. Thus SEO remains tricky business, often misunderstood by websites, but still essential for competing over the web.

The Internet remains the largest repository of information anywhere, and like every other topic, SEO has its set of hoaxes and myths.

• Resubmitting URLs: This ancient practice endorsed by novice SEO consultantsmay have helped a few years ago. It is common knowledge that most search engine's databases are not erased every few weeks. So, a once submitted website's ranking will not change if resubmitted a few weeks later.

• Meta Tags: Keywords remain essential, but the meta keywords tag has been ignored by major search engines for a while now. It is not uncommon to read SEO advice proclaiming meta-tags to be an essential SEO practice.

• Impact of PPC ads: Another common misconception is that pay-per-click advertising on a particular search engine has an effect on organic SEO rankings. PPC ads have no bearing whatsoever on the placement of a website on the SERP.

• Linking: This practice falls into a very grey area, considered by many to be black hat. Link farms have long been blacklisted by Google, but many a naïve developer falls for the old tip that says "linking with any kind of website is essential".

These are but a few of the many SEO myths that still persist across the Web. Only an experienced SEO company can properly handle your website's SEO ranking. Choose an SEO firm that understands well the implications of its practices, and will neither jeopardize your company's search engine placement nor risk its integrity with black hat tricks.