If you thought that doing SEO will bring your web pages to the top overnight and convert visitors into paying customers, behold you are in for total disappointment. This is not to say that your web pages don’t need SEO – you need to do, if you want to be found in the internet or if your competitors are already doing it and their web pages are ranked better than your own.

If you have just started a business with a website and you are not too technically savvy of SEO theory, then get yourself armed with it, it will help you negotiate with the digital marketing company that you are about to contract for getting you web pages better ranked than at present. There are simply too many detractors who will tell you that doing SEO is a waste of money, but I take it that they are no better qualified than you to take an appropriate decision.

Is SEO a myth that was invented by digital marketing firms to mint money by scaring business owners? Not really, SEO is real, but more important than that, businesses must not get carried away by tall promises – there are other things that you need to combine with SEO endeavors to realize the benefits of doing it.

SEO is a combination of multiple endeavors including getting noticed in social media like Twitter, Facebook, Quora, and LinkedIn… and only when your business is active in multiple media can you reap the benefits wholesomely.

There is nothing like instant gratification for your business or web pages from doing SEO ferociously even though the digital firm promised you the sky at the time of writing the contract. Like doing business in real world, getting your website to the top can be done only by adopting good, tried and tested SEO practices.

Even with tried and tested practices, results can take up to 6 months to show; but one thing you will certainly notice is the progress that is coming in – your rank will definitely go up, there will be more visitors, you will know which pages are performing well and which are not, what search terms visitors are using to find your pages and overall be able to understand the changes that you need to make immediately or later.

Follow the golden rule of not giving up; allocate a budget and remain consistent by providing valuable content that encourage target visitors to come back again and again.

Content is the King and Quality content is the Emperor. Creating a website layout is a one-time endeavor, but filling it with content (images and text) is a regular effort that web-masters cannot ignore. The pain point is that when you stop adding interesting content regularly, search engines sit up and start to take notice that have gone into hibernation and lower your rank. Your place, as you may have guessed will go to other web pages that are more vigorously providing fresh contents to readers on a regular basis.

If you thought that search engines are dumb and cannot tell the quality of your content, you are badly mistaken; search engines can indeed distinguish between the good and the bad to large extent. Not just that; search engines are getting smarter as they mature. In fact not a day goes without search engines making changes to their algorithms.

Here is a tip for you; pack your web pages with fresh quality content as often as your budget will allow.

Nothing can be farther from truth then this; SEO is not only complex but also a maze that involves trying to read the minds of millions of potential visitors and guessing what search terms they use, how often they search, the demography from where they come and why they are searching.

The use of a particular search term is not static; it changes over a period of time and you have to be constantly on the vigil to rework on new keywords and phrases to hold on to your current page rank. Assuming that visitors are not changing, you will still have to reckon with the possibility of search engines changing their algorithms. SEO experts guess that there are 200+ algorithms that search engines are using and constantly changing at the drop of a hat.

Search engines don’t give out their algorithms easily; only smart work, some guess work and sometimes a bit of luck can bring fast than usual results.

Here is what to understand: "SEO is smart guessing, deep mathematical analysis, art and science; and understanding people and how search engines keep changing."

No. Search engines rank each page separately. There is no way to give all your pages the #1 SEPR (search engine page rank). This means one of your pages will show up higher than another for the same search term; and in between several pages of a potential competitor.

Smart website owners therefore strive to pick out the most important from the least important for digital marketing firms to target for SEO purpose.

The Lesson to learn is; strive to optimize pages not your website.

This is utterly false. Search engines are becoming smarter and can sense keyword stuffing instantly. Gone are the days of high ranking based on domain names. Nowadays search engines don’t give a damn to your websites name; what they want is real stuff that will satisfy readers and encourage the advertisers to place their advertisement in SEPR #1.

Search engines want to give visitors a rich experience through quality content. Though they do falter and produce absurd results many a time, website owners have to live with it.

The lesson you learn: Stuffing keywords or tricking the search engine bots will only invite flake and lower your page rank significantly.