What do SEO clients and newbie internet marketers have in common? They always seem to ask the questions: "What is that secret technique that will make me rank at the top of the search engines?"

People seem to believe that there are still considerable ways available to game the search engines. They also think that the only way to rank high is to undertake that one "technique" which is hidden from the public’s eye. It is no wonder that ebooks which talk about "SEO secrets" or "Traffic Secrets" seem to captivate the crowd into buying the product.

The truth is that gaming the search engines does not work anymore now, even if it used to work in the past. Six years ago, it was easy to rank at the top by starting a new website, stuffing your keywords in the title and keyword tags and using a certain keyword density. But if you follow these techniques now, you will never rank high and might even be penalized for keyword stuffing.

People need to stop with the SEO madness! If webmasters could just concentrate on providing the search engines what they want i.e. good content, their rankings will improve automatically.

The main SEO issue which gets discussed a lot is the keyword density. People still seem to believe that a 2.5% or 3.5% keyword density is the ticket to the top. There are even a lot of blog posts written on this topic, trying to get webmasters to understand how useless this measure is. Keyword density, in my opinion, is one of the least important SEO factors. I have seen websites ranking high for keywords which were nowhere in the website.

Another misconception in SEO is that people think that if they put more than 20 links a day, Google will penalize them. Remember, there are websites out there which get 10,000 links a day because of their unique content or news. There is no such thing as Google penalizing you if you exceed a certain number of links a day. If, however, you are spamming, you will get penalized.

In conclusion, stop spending time on finding that one "secret" which will make you get thousands of visitors a day. Focus on your content, website navigation and your keywords and you will start ranking higher in Google.