There are a few things that are certain. Death, taxes, and the fact that web designers just don’t get search engines (actually, a select few do). These days a lot of folks build websites that are cool, colorful, and Web 2.0ish, but not optimized for search engines. Leaving SEO to your web designer is like asking an astronomer to do a surgery on you. There is a good chance it’s not going to work.

Web designers are good at finding the right contract of colors for your site or designing attractive layout for your sites. But what they are not good at is how to design a site that is search-engine friendly. A lot of people go rentacoder.com and and post a project asking for someone who can design a site that is good looking and search engine friendly. The truth is a whole lot of designers don’t know what you mean by that. Unfortunately, many designers are not willing to accept they don’t know something. So they design your site, and then ask you for a few thousands more to make your site search engine friendly.

Web designers are not stupid. They know SEO is a hot topic these days, and they can’t afford to acknowledge their lack of knowledge in that area. In addition, a few designers actually think they know SEO when in fact they have no idea what they are talking about. You can’t fault web designers here. You need to be as specific as you can be with these guys, and even then expect your site to be less than optimized. But it’s better to know the facts beforehand than putting your complete trust in someone who will probably not provide you with what you are looking for. When it comes to SEO, most web designers do not get it. That’s just a fact of life.

That’s got to be the lamest claim that I have heard during my career. There seems to be a whole lot of folks (underground marketers) who believe that advertising on Google as No. 1 actually pushes you down in search engine rankings. Now, I am all for fascinating conspiracy theories such as governments hiring UFOs and things like that. However, just because you are ranked No. 1 on the paid section of the SERPs doesn’t mean that Google will penalize you.

Google makes a lot of money from folks that are obsessed with the No. 1 position. Their business is built around maximizing the amount of money they snag from advertisers. However, for Google to think that it can create even more hunger for the No. 1 position in the paid section but penalizing organic listings, the folks there should be smoking something.

Google does talk about how being in No. 1 position is wonderful for your business. However, they simply have no interest in pushing people down in the rankings for no reason. At the end of the day, the organic search is very volatile and you can move from position No. 1 to nowhere in matter of days with no apparent reason. Believe it or not that happens to a lot of people (including top SEO pros). So my answer to this question is, stop blaming others and start looking at what is it that you are doing wrong. Maybe it’s that the competition is growing stronger. Maybe you are leaking page rank, or your site-map is broken. But if you don’t believe me, just turn your PPC campaign off and see if you can recover your organic position. Can’t get more simple than that, can it?

Uncertainty is the nature of search engine optimization. Google provides us all with a guideline on how to keep our pages optimized for its bots, but it doesn’t tell us which factor is more important, or what truly determines the ranking for a site (for a specific term). So, it’s only natural for SEOs to make up stories to make more money. One of these unfounded claims is the fact that you can hurt your rankings by putting Google Adsense on your blog or website right away. Now that can’t be further from the truth. I have done numerous experiences with Adsense, and I can tell you that Google would not discourage its Adsense users from putting ad units on their sites. Having said that, Google does care about the quality of content that you put on your site. Google has been specific in the past about the fact that it hates “thin affiliates.” It’s easy to use software packages such as HyperVRE to create Adsense pages on the fly, but you need to make sure you add quality content to avoid ranking penalties. But if you are not just slapping useless content on your pages, then Adsense will not hurt your rankings. Anybody who’s telling you otherwise is either misled or trying to make some cash.