There are many SEO mistakes that people make, that either send their sites down to the hundredth page of search results, or get them de-indexed, and it basically comes down to trying to fool Google, or forgetting to do some simple things.

I cannot say definitively that these are the top ten SEO mistakes, because I haven't looked at any studies that show concrete figures, but these are some of the main ones I see.

Having a Title That Won't get Searched

This is the first thing you need to get right. If I had called this article nine mistakes that people make with SEO, nobody would type that exact phrase into Google ever, unless they were looking for that particular article.

You might be lucky enough to get on the first page of a search on mistakes people make with SEO, but only because there was no great competition for that phrase. The first keyword is the most important, and nine is irrelevant. Try to write a title that is specific, but not so specific that noone will ever type it into Google.

The other mistake people make with titles is choosing one that is so specific they get less than one hit a day. Set your sights a bit higher than that, and hopefully you can push it up to the first page with back links.

Google favor local content, so if you are in the US, you might have to be a little more specific than some other parts of the world, unless you make heaps of back links.

Keyword Stuffing

This is one of the worst mistakes you can make in SEO, because too many keywords are much worse than not enough. It looks like spam to Google, and an attempt to fool them into thinking your page is more relevant, but any more than 5% of each of your main keywords in the text and you are penalized harshly. About 3% for your first two tagged keywords, and maybe less for the others should be sufficient.

Bad Description

You couldn't have a top ten of the worst mistakes in SEO without this one. It may only affect your search results after people continuously ignore your article, in favor of one with a more enticing description, but if they don't click on it, it will be given a bad Google rating, and lower placing in the SERPs.

Bad Design

If you have a long article, you should break it up into short paragraphs at the least, preferably with subheadings that have relevant complimentary keywords to the subject matter. You don't want to include too many of your main keywords in the subheadings, or that will look like you're trying to fool Google as well. Add a couple of photos and maybe a video, so long as it doesn't affect the loading time of the page too much.

Not Making Back Links

You really have to make back links if you want to compete for the first page of a popular search. SEO companies make 90% of their money by making back links to a site, and Google definitely still hold back links as an important algorithm, because they have to find the main page, not all the other "junk" pages that were only made as back links.

Page rank is not that easy to work out, because Google doesn't tell you exactly how they calculate it, but basically if a page links to yours, it transfers some of it's page rank onto yours, divided by the amount of links leading from that page.

More back links from anywhere is usually better than less, but if you are creating new pages from social bookmarking sites or articles as back links, make a few links to them as well, to boost their page rank, and therefore yours. I talk more about sites to make back links from in other articles.

Forgetting Social Promotion

Some people have more success with sites like Facebook and Twitter than others, but you have to gradually build up your friends list on as many sites as you can, in order to have an email list to send your pages to, or a news feed to post your pages into.

For me, Stumble Upon works better than Twitter or Facebook, because you can share directly to someone's email, in the hopes they will "like" your page. You just have to be careful not to share too much, or to share un-interesting pages, or they will unfollow you.

No Regular Updates

If you don't regularly update your site with fresh content, or new articles, it may slip down the SERPs. Older sites are given more credibility, but only if they get updated, because nobody wants information that's five years old, especially not in SEO, because there are always changes being made to how Google operates.

Technical Errors

There are many mistakes you can make with a website that stop Google from crawling certain pages, and I'm not too familiar with these, because I don't have my own website, I only write articles on sites like Factoidz. You can go to Webmaster Tools to check if you have problems with coding that might stop Google finding pages on your site.

Making Back LInks From Bad Link Text

Google looks at just about everything, like when you make a back link, they look at the link text that it came from, so you want to make it from a relevant keyword, or keyword phrase. Never make a back link from a URL, a irrelevant phrase like click here, or definitely not from a whole paragraph of text. It probably won't hurt you that bad, but it will make the back link useless.

Black Hat Techniques

Some "black hat" techniques are illegal, such as hacking into the passwords of other websites and changing their pages so they link to yours, but people would usually see this on their home page, and if you tried to hide the link, Google would recognize that as well.

Some other black hat techniques might be to spam email people with links to your site. Generally, this would just give your site a bad reputation, and you have to spam about 500,000 people to get one sale.

Black hat techniques may work for some, but you have to be a really good hacker, and so I would say that it's not worth breaking the law for most people. Those were my top ten SEO mistakes, please feel free to leave any you think I missed in a comment, and for help with SEO, check out SEO Preston.

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