Anyone who is interested in making money online, be it via a retail Website or through affiliate marketing, knows the importance of having a Website that ranks well in the search engine results pages, or SERPS. Unless you have a well-known brand name, you are going to need help from the search engines in order to draw traffic to your Web site. As Google draws nearly half of all search requests on the Internet, ranking well for that particular search engine is vitally important. It is also, according to most sources, quite difficult to do. In fact, there are endless numbers of books and consultants that offer advice on search engine optimization so that you might gain an edge over your competition in the results pages.

Longtime Web marketer/programmer/writer Jonathan Leger says that the notion that it is difficult to rank well in the Google results pages is largely a myth, and in order to dispel those misconceptions he has written a 47 page report about the topic, entitled 'Search Engine Myths Exposed." In this report, Jonathan attempts to dispel a number of popular rumors about how search engines work and how difficult it can be to get them to work for you.

Search Engine Myths Exposed covers a number of topics related to Google, all of which Jon says are misconceptions or outright falsehoods:

Google knows everything

Duplicate content can hurt you

Your site must focus on one subject in order to rank well

Links from unrelated sites will not help you

You must update content regularly

Good Pagerank automatically leads to higher rankings

Getting a good ranking in the SERPs is difficult

Each of these topics is addressed in detail, and Jonathan provides specific examples of Websites that have managed to succeed even though they seemingly violate these rules that have long been thought to be written in stone. Although breaking all of these "rules" without any clear plan will probably not be helpful, it is possible to rank well in Google without following each of these rules to the letter. Most importantly, Jonathan points out that is neither difficult nor expensive to get your site to rank well for any particular topic and that you do not need the help of expensive search engine optimization consultants in order to be successful.

Search Engine Myths Exposed is a must read for anyone who has an interest in having their Websites rank well in the major search engines.