As search engine marketing has become ubiquitous and, in most marketers’ minds, synonymous with generating profits from their Web sites, lore has sprung up around the process. Those who have an axe to grind or a product to sell mainly propagate these myths.

When the success or failure of your Web site can be determined by a creature as capricious as the Google spider, then it’s not surprising that rumors and misinformation abound. Let’s try to dispel some of the myths that have been repeated so often that they’ve become accepted as truths.

Myth 1 Anyone can build a Web site and use search engine marketing to make it profitable.

This one is a holdover from the early days of pay-per-click (PPC), when all anyone needed to do was buy thousands of clicks for a penny, sign up for an Amazon affiliate program and watch the checks roll in. I personally spoke with several advertisers when I was at Overture (back when it was GoTo) who made big bucks just buying clicks and sending the traffic to their favorite affiliate program.

Nowadays, with most of the competitive keywords on the Internet costing a dollar or more, you need a strong marketing plan, a well-designed Web site and a good business model to generate a living. Yes, you can put up a site, sign up for a few affiliate programs and display a few banners, but don’t expect to quit your day job. To make it work, you need to know what you are doing. In order to generate significant traffic to your site, you need to have a decent enough profit margin in your product so that you can afford to spend money marketing it.

Whether you are an affiliate or a retailer, the product or service you are selling needs to generate at least $20 per sale for you to even think about doing PPC – unless you already have a guaranteed stream of traffic to your Web site, a very large marketing budget and you are building a business model around volume rather than individual sales. Remember this when thinking about which affiliate programs to join, because there are very few products that can be sold successfully and sustainably on the Web without traffic from search engines.

Unless you know Web design and site optimization very well, you are going to end up having to troll for traffic by buying clicks. In order to do that, you need to have enough leverage in your profit margin to be able to build your sales, and you need a product and Web site that are attractive enough to generate repeat customers and continue to lower your cost per acquisition.

I’m not trying to paint a bleak picture; I know many smaller advertisers who have quit their day jobs and built a business using PPC advertising alone. They just made sure their profit margin was strong enough to allow them to do it, and they didn’t buy into the new get-rich-quick schemes.

Myth 2 You’ll never be the victim of click fraud.

While the search engines take this stuff very seriously (at least Overture and Google do), they are at the mercy of bots and hackers constantly assailing their systems for their own nefarious gains. By now, most people out there realize that they have to have a virus program installed on their computer or they are bound to get burned by a vicious attack. The same thing is true of your Web site. If you are a PPC advertiser, eventually you are going to get hit with fraudulent clicks, especially if you are in any of the competitive channels.

Overture and Google catch the majority of them, but your campaign is still going to get hit by at least 5 to 10 percent of clicks that are not real. This number is not now, nor has it ever been, 50 percent, by the way. That’s another myth that’s being touted around the Web right now that simply isn’t true. I personally know at least 100 advertisers, both large and small, who are getting at least 5 percent conversion rates from their PPC campaigns, and that just wouldn’t be possible with 50-percent click fraud rates.

This is your campaign and your livelihood. Do yourself a favor: Before you spend a whole bunch of money on PPC advertising, set up tracking URLs. Take advantage of conversion tracking from Overture and Google, and buy yourself a good click-tracking solution.

Some good, inexpensive ones include WhosClickingWho.com, Click Auditor from KeywordMax.com and ClickTracks. com. Not only will these programs inform you about the nefarious clicks, but they will also tell you about the real ones so you can determine how much you should actually be paying for clicks.

With your click information in hand, you can go to the search engines and question any clicks that you know are bogus. The search engine companies will research this, and if they find the clicks questionable you will get a refund. Partnering with the search engines in this way is the best way to safeguard your business, and no one benefits when click fraud is allowed to continue.

Another way to guard against click fraud is to be very careful when selecting smaller search engines to work with. Many of them simply don’t have the resources to invest in the technology needed to safeguard their advertisers from fraudulent clicks.

Myth 3 Once you build your Web site and start getting traffic, you are done.

Search engine marketing is one of the most iterative marketing processes ever developed. One of the hardest things about marketing on the Web is that you’re never done. The search engines are constantly changing their processes, and you should constantly test landing pages and creative on your search engine marketing campaigns. New affiliate programs are constantly arriving on the scene, and everyone is in search of the next big thing.

You don’t need to follow what’s in fashion to be successful. You just need to make sure you stay up to date on issues and take full advantage of all the latest marketing channels that become available.

That means trying local and international traffic and seeing how it converts, adding things like contextual advertising to your site to try to monetize every square inch of the page and continuing to learn how you can provide a better product or service for your customers.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it truly does create an even playing field for all. Search engine marketing makes it easy for a small marketer to compete with a Fortune 500 company.

You can sell your product internationally or locally, work at home in your pajamas and generate a good living. All you have to do is play it smart, market to a niche and watch your profit margin like a hawk!

MARY O’BRIEN is a partner at Traffic-Mentor.net. She has worked in Internet marketing for five years and was formerly senior director of sales at Overture.com.