Search engine optimization seems to be shrouded in mystery or mistruths amongst a lot of people. I'm going to take this opportunity to clear up a lot of misconceptions about SEO.

Optimizing a site needs to be only done once. Nothing stays static in the world of search engines. New sites are launched, your competitors are working to outrank you, the search engine algorithms changed which all lead to your site dropping in the rankings and therefore getting less traffic. Plus after you worked to get your site ranking well for keyword, you need to move on to the next keyword and get your site ranking well for that one. It never ends.

PageRank or PR is a good measure of a website. Google's PageRank number rating is not accurate or being used as a measure of success anymore after Google quit providing accurate PR numbers. This why you'll find PR 2 websites outranking PR 4 websites.

Put any keyword related to your dealership in the Meta Keyword tag to get more traffic. Google quit using the Meta Keyword tag quite awhile ago and Yahoo has quit using it as well.

You need to submit your site to search engines. That hasn't been done for years. Let the search engines find your website by follow links to your site. This is how they want to find your site.

Websites are treated equally in Google. You may have a new optimized domain name, and well optimized website but a domain that has been around longer with more backlinks will outrank you.

You can have guaranteed top placement by SEO companies. No company can guarantee top or #1 placement for any keyword. Search engine rankings fluctuate all the time based on the search engine algorithm's changing, what your competitors are doing, and new pages and websites getting launched. There is very stiff competition for some keywords and it could take years to take over a top spot.

If you click on your website a lot, you'll rank higher/if you go to your website too often you can cause it to get penalized by search engines. Neither one of these is true and yet I hear them often.

You must submit your website to thousands of directories to rank well. Submitting to directories does give you a backlink to your website, which will help you rank well if the directory. But you need to pick carefully which directories you submit your site to, or you're wasting your time. Make sure the directory has been around for awhile so it has an aged domain, you get a static and direct text link back to your website, you can choose the keyword that will be used to link back to your website and that the directory has a good inbound link profile.