1.) Maximizing a site for the wrong keywords
The first step in any search engine optimization project is to choose the optimal keyword phrases for which to optimize your website. If you choose the wrong keyword phrases, all the effort and time in trying to get a website to list in the first page will be wasted. If the key words you selected have very few people searching for them, or if the selected keywords don't attract relevant targeted visitors to your site, then you will have very little benefit from ranking high.
2.) Putting too many keywords in the Meta Keywords tag
Websites which have hundreds of keywords entered in the Meta Key Words tag (hidden at the top of the page), in the hope that by providing all the possible different keyword phrases in the Meta Keywords tag they will get a better ranking for those key words, are wasting their time. It won't help. Despite popular opinion, the Meta Keywords tag have hardly any remaining importance as far as search engine ranking is concerned. Consequently, simply by listing key words in the Meta Keywords tag, a website won't actually be able to win a better ranking.
3. Repeating the same keywords too much
Another typical mistake is to repeat target keyword phrases in the body text pages and in Meta Tags. Because so many have attempted using this straegy historically and many still do, the search engines are tracking this constantly. They can block a website which repeats key words in this way, called keyword stuffing. Just repeating the keyword phrases over and over again will no longer be effective.
4. Adding lots of similar doorway pages
Another superstition is that since the algorithm of each search engine varies, they must to make different types of pages for different search engines. While this is great as an idea, it is counter-productive in practice. Anyone using this method, will quickly end up with hundreds of extra pages, which quickly become a nightmare to control. In Addition the pages are meant for different search engines, they will all really end up being almost the same. Search engines are usually capable of detecting if a website has built similar doorway pages, and may penalise or even ban the website from their index as a result. Instead of building another page for each search engine, create one page which is optimized exclusively for one keyword for all the search engines together.
5. Using Hidden Text
Hidden text is text placed in the same color as the background color of your website, so that it seems imperceptible to visitors to the web page. Let's say the background color of the web page is white and if white text is added to that page, it is imperceptible and considered to be hidden text. Many webmasterss, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, used to try to fill their pages with these additional concealed keywords. However, there is a specific limit to the number of additional keyword phrases anyone can keep adding in a web page before it seems to sound strange to human viewers.
Thus, to be able to hide it from the human visitors, but still maintain it keyword intense, many web designers added key words with the identical color as the background color.
This ensures that what the search engines can index the key words, the human visitors cannot. The search engines have long since caught up with this technique, and block the pages which contain this kind of text. They may also ignore the entire website if even a single page in that website has such hidden text.
The problem is that the search engines may end up blocking websites which had not intended to use concealed text. For example there is a webpage with a white background and another table with a black background. Then insert some white text into that table. Although seen by human viewers, the search engines can decode this to be hidden text, ignoring that the background of the table is really black.
6. Creating WebPages With Only Pictures
Search engines only read text - they don't read pictures. If a website has a lot of graphics content and very little text content, it is less probable to get a high listing. To strengthen the rankings, the graphics need to be associated with keyword rich text so that the spidering robots will understand what is in the website.
7. Ignoring the NOFRAMES tag in the case if your website uses frames
Many search engines can't process frames. For sites which use these frames, search engines only count what is within the NOFRAMES tag. Many webmasters make the mistake of adding something like this to the NOFRAMES tag: "This website contains frames, but browser doesn't support them". For the search engines which don't process frames, this is all thetext that they will index, which means the chances of a good listing is much smaller.
8. Using Page Cloaking
Page cloaking is a tactic used to deliver different webpages under different conditions. People usually use page cloaking for two reasons: A) to conceal the original source code of their optimized pages from their competitors and B) in order to stop human viewers from seeing a webpage which looks great to the search engines but doesn't otherwise look great to humans. The problem is that when a site uses this cloaking way, it stops the search engines from being able to index the same webpage that the viewers are likely to see. And if search engines get something else, they can not be certain to deliver relevant results. If a search engine discovers that a site has page cloaking, it will most likely ban the website forever from their index.
9. Utilizing Pre-Programmed Submission Programs
To take a shortcut, many web masters use on-human software or service to send out sites and webpages to search engines. Submitting your website manually to search engines takes a lot of time and automatic submission methods reduce the time. But search engines don't want software submissions and may sometimes blacklist them. But this is altering as software becomes more common.
10. Submitting too many pages per day
Sending out too many webpages at a time to the search engines can be a problem, and may result in search engines ignoring most of the webpages which have been submitted. Submitting one page per day to the search engines works. Although some search engines accept more than one page each day from each domain, there are a few which will only take a page per day.