As part of efforts to market a brick and mortar business' Internet presence, a lot of company's turn to search engine optimization (SEO) to do the trick for them. But SEO in itself is a tricky process as well. Yes, it can be an important part of a company's Internet marketing arsenal and it can be relatively cost-effective if done right but there are many myths about SEO that you have to sift through in order to assess their validity. Here are 5 SEO myths that you may have to stop believing from hereon.

1. Setting Up Multiple Domains

Some SEO practitioners recommend to set up multiple domains to drive more traffic to your primary website. The key to remember in any SEO strategy is that SEO involves a complicated interplay of many factors so that concentrating on just one, like setting up multiple domains and trying to generate as much backlinks to your primary website through these domains, may not always work. The downside of this of course is that having multiple domains is relatively expensive because of the yearly fees for domain name and the corresponding yearly hosting and maintenance fee to keep these domain websites running. Not to mention that it would be equally time consuming to maintain these multiple websites.

2. Search Engine Submission

Some people believe that it is necessary for you to resubmit your website's information every few weeks to the major search engines. The truth is that this may even hurt your priority ranking in the process. When you have already submitted your website's information to a search engine, there is really no need for you to keep on updating that information in the search engine's database.

3. Meta Tags

Ten to fifteen years ago, the use of meta tags indeed had a big influence on getting ranked in the search engines, and thus resulting in more visitors to one's website. Current search engine algorithms however, do not place much priority anymore on the use of these meta tags. What is relevant though is the way that search engines use your meta description tags when your website is listed in the SERP or the Search Engine Results Page. The SERP is a list or results generated by a search engine as a response to specific keyword or keywords. So while your meta tags may not directly affect your rankings anymore, having well written meta descriptions can still increase the number of searchers who visit your site when they check out the SERP.

4. SEO Is Very Expensive

This myth seems to be true at first glance especially if you don't consider your whole SEO initiative as part of a bigger picture. But if you consider SEO as part of your overall marketing effort, you will realize that other marketing options can be far more expensive. Think print advertisement, direct mailing, or even buying radio or TV ad time. Add to these participating in trade fairs and you will see that SEO can be a far better alternative especially if you consider the return on your investment over the long haul. Another myth related to this is that when companies do decide to go SEO they think that it would be better to have an in-house SEO person because it can be a lot less expensive. Again the failure to see the wisdom of outsourcing one's SEO activities to a professional company in terms of having better return on investment is another proof of the shortsightedness brought about by this myth.

5. SEO is Hardly Relevant

Some companies have the mistaken notion that people get to their website through their website URL. Research on website user behavior shows that many people type the name of the company or something related to the company's business on search engines to easily locate the website. They would rather do this than recall the website's URL at all. In fact, even for big companies like Microsoft or Apple, they would rather type the name on a search engine rather than typing a URL on the browser's address bar.

These are just five major myths that you should stop believing if you really wish to make SEO work for you and your business.