By Blair Thomas, co-founder of eMerchantbroker.com

For the most part, one can say that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is part art and part science. As an art, it would require an SEO professional a lot of creative juice to come up with a strategy that readily entices people to stay and learn more about the company. As a science, SEO typically employs a set of rules and procedures in order to come up with the expected results consistently. Unfortunately, being both an art and a science has led the practice of SEO to spawn a number of myths:

1. Content Marketing is dead. Google, considered to be the top search engine today, puts additional emphasis on organic link building. This doesn’t mean you can’t harness the power of articles to your advantage. You can still make use of content marketing in order to set yourself as an authority in the niche you belong to. Recognizing what sets it apart and how it contributes to the bigger picture can’t give extinction to content marketing.
2. Design your website first and then work on optimization strategies. Most amateur designers will advise you to set up your website site before actually optimizing it. In truth, this doubles the work that needs to be done. Instead, you should keep in mind the optimization strategy while the site is being built. The execution of crucial optimization strategies may be impeded by a restrictive budget that was redirected to website set-up.
3. SEO is all you need to grow your business. It’s true that proper SEO strategies can help you get the traffic that you need. However, that alone is not enough to convert this traffic into actual sales. You want make sure that you do offline marketing in order to reach out to prospective clients who might not have access to the Internet. In the same light, you want to be aware of what the online world is saying about your business. Negative feedback has the tendency to travel faster.
4. You have to change how you optimize your website as frequently as the search engines change their respective algorithm. While you may be familiar with the top search engines, you may not be aware that there are more than a hundred search engines that regularly index your site. If you changed the way you optimized your website to follow how each site’s algorithm worked, one day would not be enough. That being the case, you want to make sure that your strategy is one that focuses on providing the right information and content. Since the top search engines are focused on providing a more personal experience for site visitors, use this as a guide to anticipate what your next step will be.

These myths are more popular among ecommerce websites because it’s one of the niches that can be quite hard to optimize. In truth, you just need to be patient a little bit longer before you can see your efforts come into fruition.