There have been a few myths that have been floating around for quite some time regarding search engine submission.

Many marketers have been made to believe that it is crucial to submit your site to as many search engines as you can if you want to be found and indexed. This falsehood has caused a lot of business owners to waste time and money doing the wrong things.

Here are a few popular myths—along with a dose of the truth.

Myth: You Have to Submit Your Site to Get Noticed

For the most part, you DO NOT have to submit to any search engines to be found. The search engines will find you if you use good SEO and provide quality content.

One of the best things you can do when marketing your business is to have a branded website where all your marketing efforts begin and end. Just throwing up any type of website will not do your business any favors.

In fact, a poorly designed website can actually harm your business and the image your customers have of it. But branding is not just about how your website looks. To ensure that you have a perfectly branded website, follow these steps.

Choose Your Domain Name Wisely

If you already have a name for your business, your domain name should match it. If you cannot purchase the same exact name—because someone else has it—consider using keywords or keyword phrases that match what you do in your business.

Be careful here, though. If you change your products or services later, you will have to start over.

Website traffic is a good thing. In fact, for many business owners, driving traffic to their website is their primary avenue for business-building.

And while traffic may be all well and good, what you really want is targeted website traffic. You want the people visiting your website to be potential prospects. Your goal should be to turn them into future customers.

Here are 6 effective strategies to guarantee targeted website traffic.

1. PPC ads. Of course, not all Pay Per Click ad campaigns generate targeted traffic. You have to study your prospects and design keyword-specific ads that send traffic to a web page related to the ad.

If you have a website about foods for people with Celiac Disease and your potential customers have to dig to find information about bread alternatives, you're not sending the right kind of targeted website traffic to the right place. Send them directly to your bread products page.

What's the number one thing your website needs?

If you answered "more traffic" or "more comments on my blog posts," you'd be in good company. But you'd be wrong. In fact, the only thing your website needs is to capture more leads. Generating leads for your business is a website's main function.

Capturing more leads isn't brain surgery or rocket science. It takes some clarity, a website that’s set up to drive leads, and a little hard but creative work.

Get Clear on What Leads You Want to Capture

First and foremost, as with most things in life, you need to get very clear on your goals – specifically, you need clarity on what kinds of leads you want to capture. The two most common kinds of leads captured on business sites are email leads and prospect/contact leads.

When it comes to the Internet, speed rules. If your website takes too long to load, you’re going to lose potential prospects. Most people click away if the website does not load within 2-3 seconds. They’re searching for information and are accustomed to instant gratification online. It’s vital that you make sure your webpages load quickly!

Here are tips on how to design your webpages for fast loading:

Graphics caution. Your graphics are the biggest culprit when it comes to slow loading webpages. The general rule of thumb is to make sure each graphic takes up no more than 10K on any given page and each page takes up no more than 30K total.

You can see why optimizing your graphics is so important. But don’t reduce the size of your images in the html code of your page. Instead, reduce the size of the image before you put it on the page. Forcing the server to recognize the code and reduce the image size every time it loads slows down the loading time significantly.

Want to write great website content but you’re not sure how? There are only a handful of things that differentiate great content from not-so-great content. Learn to master these few tactics and you'll improve your content.

Write Conversationally

Conversational content is content that is written in a friendly tone. It’s almost personal – as if you were writing your article, blog post or report specifically for the person reading it. Conversational content is written using informal language. Instead of saying, “Business people write content” you would say, “You write content.”

Conversational content often breaks a few grammar rules when it makes sense. For example, you might write an incomplete sentence. For impact. You might use ellipses...

Your website and your blog are often the primary sources of online content for business owners. It provides not only a means of both publishing and managing content, it also creates a source of interaction and the all-powerful lead generation.

Your website also becomes part of your social marketing efforts and it's likely to be integrated with your email marketing efforts, as well.

In short, you likely spend a good amount of time focused on your website. You may not have had the time or energy to step back and take a look at your online presence with a discerning eye. You may not realize that it’s way past time you gave it a good overhaul.

How Old Is Your Site Design?

When was the last time you updated your website? If you can't remember, then it's probably time for a change. It's a bit like rearranging the furniture in your home. Change the position of the couch and all of a sudden the room feels completely different—in a good way.

When you first start out building your website or talking to a website designer about building your website, it's likely you're going to be asked, "What is the purpose of your website?"

If you don't know, it's hard to create the website because without a purpose, it's impossible to get started. Not only that, it's hard to use your website the right way if you don't even know why you have it.

Here are some considerations to help you better determine the specific purpose of your website. The clearer you are, the clearer your website will be. And that's a good thing!

Do You Want to Sell Products or Services?

If this is the point of your website then you'll need an e-commerce website. It will need shopping cart technology, the proper security, the right type of server capacity, and a way to pull traffic and handle leads that don't purchase right away.

Knowing exactly who's visiting your site can give you a lot of insight into the best ways to communicate with them.

It can tell you which pages on your site people like and don't like, it can tell you what kind of audience you're attracting and it can even tell you a bit about what they're thinking when they land on your site.

Here's how to find out more about who's visiting your website.

Bounce Rates, Return Rates and Length of Stay

These stats will tell you a lot about what people are thinking about your content.

If a lot of people land on your pages and leave right away, then you're probably not catching their attention.

On the other hand, if a lot of people land on certain pages and stay for a long period of time, then that probably means that your visitors like your content and are staying to take it all in.

You've probably seen the show Wheel of Fortune where people spin the wheel to determine what prizes they could win. If you were to spin the Internet Fortune Wheel, where would your website land? Would it be on the winning side or are you closer to going bankrupt?

Many business owners think they can zip out any old site—or ask a high school student to do it—and it will work for them. But that's an attitude you can't afford to have when it comes to working online.

Why is it so important to have a well-created site? Because your website is the calling card for your online business. Without it, you would have difficulty getting people to find you, let alone buy your products.

At the same time, it's the "first impression maker" for your business. Publishing a site to the Internet that isn't appealing or doesn’t cut it will cause the Internet wheel to land on the losing side for you. If you want your business to be a success, don't risk your hard earned money and time by having an ineffective site.