There are many SEO myths still floating around on the internet. Some were once valid, and some never worked ever. It is very important to know what these are so you avoid making mistakes that could cost you big-time in the search engines.

MYTH: You need to submit your website manually to search engines to get it into their index.

REALITY: Entirely false. Search engines prefer to find new sites through backlinks, or links to your website from other websites. If search engines can't find a backlink to your site, then your popularity is doomed and a manual submission a waste. By far, work on backlinks and you could be indexed within 48 hours.

MYTH: You need to resubmit your website to search engines manually once a week.

REALITY: Not only is this unnecessary once (noted in the last myth), but resubmitting it many times can in fact get you banned from the search engine index.

MYTH: In order to get indexed to many search engines, you should use one of those search engine submission services.

REALITY: Absolutely 100% false. For one, the only search engines to worry about are Google, Msn, Yahoo, and Ask. Google by far powers a major of the market, powering search engines like AOL. Get into these 4, and you've covered around 98% of the market.

MYTH: Meta tags are still alive and well. You must pay attention to these if you want the search engines to index you, and correctly.

REALITY: True and false. While some search engines look at meta tags like keywords and description (and always safe to fill them out correctly, NO SPAM ), most search engines like Google look at the content of the page. Just build content and backlinks if you want to increase your ranking.

MYTH: I heard that doing <insert idea here> can get you quickly to the top of the search engines results pages in hours.

REALITY: If you want a lasting high ranking, you need to build up your site. This means content, something people would want to see/visit, and you need backlinks. Later, content will draw backlinks, but at first you'll need to work on it.

MYTH: SEO is too expensive.

REALITY: In reality, SEO proves to be cheaper. Organic clicks coming from organic results of searches is free per click, instead of paying a couple of bucks each. Think of SEO as an investment with high return. There are also different levels of SEO, from paying to use a backlink service to paying for a reputable SEO firm to optimize for you.

MYTH: All you need to do is build a site and you'll magically receive traffic.

REALITY: Ok, the word magically makes the myth obvious, but most people believe that just building the site is enough to get traffic. The first step is get indexed. This means get some backlinks. Search engines find your site through incoming links from other sites, or at least prefer to find it that way. If you want to build traffic, keep users in mind instead of search engines.

MYTH: Using the "broadcast to 300,000 people" will help with traffic.

REALITY: Stay as far away from this one as possible! The only traffic you'll get is people trying to find your phone number or email address to give you their opinion of spam.

MYTH: Use those services where you pay $$ for a guaranteed number of hits.

REALITY: That network will put your ad in popups, most of which will get blocked, and since they usually pop up on non-related sites, your actual gain is usually next to nothing, if even that good.

MYTH: One-way backlinks are the only useful backlinks now.

REALITY: As much as I see and hear this one, it's simply not true. Reciprocal backlinks got a bad rep because most of them came from link farms. A link farm (everyone links to everyone, a way to get thousands of backlinks in seconds) was what Google and some others went after. Reciprocal links are perfectly fine, and if they're on the same topic as your website, they're even ideal.

Tony Kristovich is the owner of EZLinkSystem.com, a link exchange service where you can register for free to exchange links the easy way with other sites.