People who are focusing on shopping cart SEO or e-commerce SEO usually fall victim to these myths, because the so-called “gurus” know that those sites need to be high in the rankings to make any real money – and might be willing to listen to just about anything.

If you really want to see SEO success, you’ll need to see right through the following 4 myths:

1. “With hard work, you will rank #1 for all of your target keywords.”

This is a popular myth that less-than-honest SEO firms keep spreading. The truth is, the SEO world is a complex one. For the most part, search engines keep their algorithms a secret. And, there are so many factors that are used to rank sites that it’s impossible to even guess what they all are.

Bottom line – anyone who guarantees that your site can be #1 in the rankings is lying to you. In SEO, there are no guarantees.

2. “If you work really hard on your SEO for a few weeks, you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

This is something that many of the “gurus” like to say – so that you’ll think that SEO is a piece of cake and buy their product. However, good SEO is never “finished”. Even if you have the #1 ranking for all of your target keywords, you still have to fight to keep them. After all, there are millions of websites that are trying to overtake you!

Bottom line – a good SEO strategy is something that you will need to work on forever.

3. “Trading links boosts your ranking.”

In SEO, the goal is to have more inbound links that outbound links. When you trade links, you’re breaking even. And, if you start trading links with a bunch of random sites, the search engines might think you’re trying to cheat the system – and that’s never a good thing.

Bottom line – there are no shortcuts to quality link building. To get the quality links you need, you’re going to have to put in hard work.

4. “Services that register your website with hundreds of search engines are helpful.”

This myth keeps being spread by people who charge money to “register your site with the search engines”. But there is no need to register with the search engines; there spiders will find you.

Bottom line – anyone who tells you that you need to register with the search engines to get ranked is lying to you.

Kirsty LaVier is editor for Shopping Cart Reviews, the leading site dedicated to helping you find the Best Shopping Cart .

Social Monkee

It offers a Firefox plugin to make the job even easier so if you could use a few backlinks to your articles (who couldn’t?) you might as well claim them now. There is an option to upgrade to a paid version which allows you up to 300 per day but I’m going to see how the free option works for a while before I think about an upgrade!

Get it FREE while it lasts

I don’t imagine the links are very powerful but if you have been involved in SEO you will know that sometimes even low power backlinks can make all the difference. There is certainly no harm in having bookmarks out there pointing to your own sites and to your articles on Squidoo or Ezinearticles. The combination of bookmarks and the authority in domains like Squidoo means you can easily start a whole web 2.0 campaign to boost your Amazon or other affiliate sales.

The way I see it, 25 free backlinks everyday (thats 750 a month!) can only be a good thing! As its Free its a no-brainer – 25 backlinks sprinkled across 100 unique domains and C class IPs daily… yes please!

I have no idea how long this will last, I would imagine they will have to start charging for this at some point so get in quick! Get it FREE while it lasts

As any web designer who handles small business clients can tell you, there are a huge number of people out there who still believe in the maxim “build it and they will come”. This unfortunately is simply not the case.

Unless your site is one of a small few that deal in the subject matter you are fighting for attention with all the other sites out there that want to get listed for the same search terms entered into a search engine like Google. Even if you are one of a few, you still need to get the search engines to realise you exist.

That is where we start our search engine optimisation journey. So let’s look at what we can do to get listed in Google.

Probably the first thing to realise is that there are many factors involved in how Google chooses to list a site, so many that it is not worth you diverting attention away from your business to learn all about it – it’s a field of its own best left to the experts.

You can however achieve a lot with just a few basic principles!

Basic SEO 1

There is no point trying to get listed for very competitive terms.

Selling shoes on your website? Don’t bother trying to get listed for the search term ‘shoes’. Get really specific and you lessen the competition dramatically. Are you one of just a handful of sites selling ‘pink australian ugg boots’ – great, why not try to get listed for that. Fewer visitors, sure – but they’re more likely to be buyers using specific terms like that.

Basic SEO 2

Write some great content all about  your specific topic

Put the best webpage together on the topic you possibly can. Tell everyone why those pink australian ugg boots are so good, put some pics of them on the page, maybe even a little history of pink ugg boots, maybe even a little video clip from Youtube if you can find one.

Basic SEO 3

Use descriptive titles and file names

Optimise (there’s that word…) your page by making the page title ‘Pink Australian Ugg Boots by My Company.com’ and if you can do it, make the url of the page something like ‘mycompany.com/pink-australian-ugg-boots.html’.

If you can name those pictures you put on the page ‘pink-australian-ugg-boots.jpg’ and ‘best-australian-pink-ugg-boots.jpg’ even better. Same thing goes for the image alt tags if you can work out how give them alt attributes.

Basic SEO 4

Beg, borrow or steal links from other sites to yours

You’ve probably heard that Google likes to see links from other sites to yours. This is very true as Google sees links as a bit like votes for a site. Get as many links as you can from other sites to yours. Even better if you can get lots  of those links from sites somewhat related to yours, maybe the boot manufacturer? The shoe association? Furryfootwear.com.au if there is one!

Better still, if some of those links have words like “pink ugg boots” and “australian ugg boots” etc as their anchor text (Anchor text is the highlighted text you click on in a link, usually blue and underlined).

There you have it – the bare bones basics of SEO, its not going to make a professional SEO out of you but its enough to get you listed for quite specific search terms. Good Luck with it…

If you are not already a member at Wealthy Affiliate I would recommend giving it some serious thought. There are tutorials in everything from article marketing to PPC marketing, a huge private forum chock full of ideas and absolute nuggets of information.

There are several tools to help you get started in making money online, from keyword tools to writing tools and even a website builder with free hosting!

Click Here to Check it Out Now

We can certainly make money from websites in those ways but we keep forgetting there is another way! When we have learned how to establish websites and maybe even learned how to optimize them for some search engine traffic, we have learned a skill that is very much in demand by local business owners.

Thee must be millions of small businesses that would love to have a website showcasing their service and even more who want to be at the top of google results pages for the relevant keywords in their area. Why not sell your skills to them? Getting good search engine listings for local area searches is actually pretty easy. You could setup simple websites and get these businesses good local search results. How much do you think a business will pay for this?

A variation on this idea is to go ahead and build a website yourself focusing on a single industry in your area. Lets say you build a site which lists well for “indian restaurants suburb/city” or “suburb/city indian restaurants”. With that already in place you could then sell listings on it to the relevant restaurants!

So the point of this post is to draw attention to the fact there are several ways to make money from websites!

Direct Sales

Indirect Sales – getting visitors to call or visit

Affiliate Programs

Adsense or similar contextual advertising

Paid ad placements

Website building for others

Just leave a comment below if you have any questions on taking these ideas further.