By Mich Christensen

Keywords
1. Failure to have a keyword strategy—Your business should complete a detailed keyword analysis to determine a focused keywords list.

2. Use of the wrong keywords—It is a common mistake to focus on the keywords that bring less business revenue.
3. Targeting overly general keywords—It is a waste of time to target for “real estate” or similarly general terms since the chance of ranking for that simple phrase is remote.
4. Satisfaction with the company name as the only working keyword—The first thing many website owners do is check to see that their corporate name appears in the search results. This is only the first test; the website should perform well for multiple important keywords.
5. Inconsistent use of your keywords—For each page of your site, you will choose a keyword string for that page of up to four words. That exact string must appear in the title, headings, and body text of that page to reinforce that particular keyword. You cannot have apples in the title, oranges in the heading, and bananas in the body text.
6. Lack of customer focus—Try to find the actual words your customers are using to type in the search queries instead of relying on the ones you think they should be using.
Titles
7. No titles—If your main page has just “home” for a title, you’ve made this mistake.
8. Failure to have your chosen keywords in the title tag—This is the most important place to include your keywords, and, therefore, neglecting to do so is one of the best ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
9. Including the keyword too late in the title—The sweet spot is at the front of the title. From an SEO standpoint, your corporate name is less important than your page’s keyword, so put the name in the middle or at the end.
10. Having the same title on multiple pages—This makes Google think every page of your site is the same old stuff. You must reflect the theme of each page in its title.
11. Stuffing the title tag with too many repetitions of your keyword—There is a limit to what Google considers a natural occurrence of the keyword. If there are too many instances of the same keyword in the title, you run the risk of raising a red flag.
12. Accidentally leaving a double space in the title—This simple mistake can cost you dearly. Some search engines have been known to choke on double spaces in the title, leaving you with no listing.
Headings
13. Lack of proper heading tags in the body text—A proper heading is more than larger bold text above a paragraph. Your webmaster should make sure these headings are proper headings with the tags

and

before and after the text in the heading. This tells the search engine that the text in the heading is significant.
14. Headings that have the wrong keywords, or no keywords at all—The second most important place to have your keyword is in the headings. You can shoot yourself in the other foot by neglecting to include the proper keywords words here.
15. All headings and no body text—Webmasters will try anything, including making the entire page a heading. Keep in mind that Google will look for natural copywriting, and will flag and investigate anything which appears unusual.
Body Text
16. No keywords in the body text area—The body text is the main body of words visible on the page. This is the third most important place to have your keywords.
17. An unnatural number of occurrences of the keyword—Google looks for a natural pattern of text in the body. In most writing, the keyword would appear a couple of times in the first paragraph, and perhaps again near the end. The same keyword in every sentence would raise a red flag that you might be an SEO expert trying to cheat the system.
18. Including too much body text—It is possible to have too much text on one page. This dilutes the effectiveness of your keywords.
19. Use of someone else’s content—Borrowing content from another source on the Internet is risky and, at worst, can flag your site for the duplicate penalty.
20. Failure to add new content—If the content of your website never changes, it will gradually slip lower in the rankings.
Links
21. Not including links from other important websites to yours——In
order to achieve top rankings, acquiring good incoming links from
other websites to yours is a must.
22. Absence of links from other websites in your keyword niche—Google knows whether the website linking to yours has any remote relation to your keyword niche. If your site is about trucks, a link from a car site would be desirable, whereas a link from a site selling strawberries would not be.
23. Back-link spamming—This is the practice of creating numerous links to your site from inappropriate locations, including forums, blogs, and guestbooks – the subject matter of which is not related to your site.
24. Participation in link farms—Your site will be considered to be in a bad neighborhood if you participate in a link farm, which offers multitudes of incoming links for your site when you post a page of the link farm’s outgoing links.
25. Having no site map—The site map is the fastest way to illustrate all your links to both the human visitor and the search engine spider. Without one, navigating or spidering the site can be limited to the effectiveness of the linking structure between pages of your website.
26. Including no keywords in the URL—The URL is the entire web address of the page. It is desirable to include the keyword either in the domain name, the folder names, or the actual filename. Examples: www.mybusiness.com/folder-name/keyword.htm or www. mybusiness.com/keyword/filename.htm.
27. Lack of inclusion in directory listings—Inclusion in large directories, such as the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org, is very desirable.
28. Having no anchor text— Also called link text, this is a link to a
page of your website which appears on one of your pages or the pages
of another website, which uses the keyword phrase as the actual link.
29. Use of paid links—Google can detect and penalize those utilizing any system to trick the search engines though the use of paid links intended to increase rankings.
30. Including no outgoing links—You should include outgoing links to other quality websites.
Meta Tags
31. Ignoring the description meta tag—This is the fourth most important place to have your keywords.
32. Keyword-stuffing in the description meta tag—Be careful not to include the keyword too many times; it should read naturally.
33. Placing your chosen keywords only at the end of the description and keyword tags—The sweet spot for your most important keywords is at the front of these tags.
34. Ignoring the keyword meta tag—This is a great place to include all the important keywords of your page. The search engines give it some limited weight when making their calculations.
35. Keyword-stuffing in the keywords meta tag—Keep any repetitions of the keyword separated by other words, and try to keep a balance of various words versus your keyword.
36. Including false keywords—The reason the keyword tag carries less weight in the search engine calculation these days is that everyone made a habit of stretching the truth here. Try to use only the words actually appearing on the page and you may get a boost in your rankings.
Tricks
37. Hidden text – Using white text on white background in an attempt to include more keywords on the page that humans won’t see. This long outdated trick will only get you blacklisted.
38. Cloaking – This technique was used by webmasters to trick the search engine into seeing an alternate version of the page with the intention of earning higher rankings If detected by the search engine algorithm, this intentionally deceptive trick brings a severe penalty, since the search engine spider sees something entirely different from what a human sees.
Unreadable
39. Expecting the search engine to read flash animation—Most search engines haven’t yet learned how to scan and index flash content, which is invisible to the indexing spider. An html alternative that the search engine can read should be provided.
40. Use of a splash page—If you have only a large flash graphic on the first page of your site, Google cannot see it. You now have a blank page for your index page, and the automatic redirect that is common for splash pages will give Google a second reason to pass it by. The index page of your site being the most important one, this is a serious mistake for a site seeking high rankings.
41. Entire site in flash – Some high-end sites consist of only one page,
with one huge flash file that gives the appearance of several pages.
Keeping in mind that most search engines cannot read flash, now the
site from their point of view has only one page. This is less than
optimal for rankings, to say the least.
42. Text in images—A search engine spider cannot see anything included in an image. Any fancy image-based headings should be redesigned.
43. No alt attribute tag for images—At the very least, alt tags for images should help the visually impaired to view your site. At its best, it can be an opportunity to include keywords. Use the alt attribute to describe, with keywords, the image content.
44. Javascript menus—Javascript is often unreadable by the spider. This interferes with the basic function of a spider, which needs to follow links to find other pages of your site.
45. Lack of robots.txt and no follow—In some cases, there are pages of your site that shouldn’t be indexed, like your printer friendly pages, which are essentially duplicates of the original page. To avoid the duplicate penalty, use a properly constructed robots.txt file or use no-follow attributes in links to instruct the spider to ignore these pages.
Wasting Time
46. Submitting your web pages to every search engine you can find—Most of the search engines you can submit your site to will only fill your mailbox with spam. No legitimate search engine will require an e-mail address to add your site.
47. Using your unique content on more than one of your websites— If you
have created unique content for your site, that is ideal. You can
quickly ruin all that work by posting that content in more than one
place before Google has a chance to register who posted first.
48. Leaving spelling and grammar errors uncorrected—These can undermine trust between you and your customer. Google has even considered scanning for spelling and grammar mistakes as an indication of a website’s readiness for the business web.
49. No or limited SEO specialist involvement—You will save a lot of advertising dollars if your SEO specialist participates in your website development in the early stages. Many website owners make the mistake of hiring an SEO specialist and then assuming the interaction is over. You’ll get best results by sharing regular updates with your hired professional, and by ensuring that the specialist uses no high-risk techniques.
50. Ignoring the webmaster guidelines published by the search engines—Google™, Yahoo!® and MSN® each have a set of recommendations published for webmasters to follow. Disregard them at your own peril.
Note: Google™, Yahoo!, and MSN® are trademarks owned by third parties not affiliated with the author or publisher.