As the importance of search engine optimization becomes more readily accepted as the norm among webmasters and web designers, the demand for the average search engine optimization company has been steadily growing. Furthermore, with the continuing rise in the costs of pay-per-click, and ever-altering regulations by the search engines, this growth is not likely to slow at any time soon. Unfortunately, many businesses who readily accept SEO as a vital part of their search engine marketing are also unknowingly disrupting the efforts that their chosen search engine businesses have so carefully taken.

The following is a list of the most common errors made by webmasters and web designers that cause great damage to the potential results of their SEO:

- Insisting on high rankings, but without any changes to the website. It is commonly believed that search engines have some sort of magical technological formula that can simply be plugged in to achieve the right results. However, the reality couldn't be further from that assumption. Favorable, long-term search engine ranking is dependent upon a combination of technology and continuously updated website content. For this reason, an ethical search engine optimization business has no choice but to turn away customers who want results without altering their website content.

The content includes both the text and the images of the website. It is these elements that allows search engine spiders to learn about the website as a whole. It is this same content which allows internet directories and other websites to determine whether your site is worthy of a link. This is important because link popularity is among the major considerations when ranking your website.

True, it may be difficult to give up your current website content after paying a great deal of money for it from an expert web designer, but the bottom line is that as attractive as your current site may be, if its content is not properly optimized, altered, and updated, it will be much more costly in lost opportunities.

- Updating their website on their own without consulting their search engine business first. This is an extremely common and very innocent mistake which can overturn many potential successes that were already on their way to playing in your favor.

This is most common when webmasters simply update the website, perhaps with a recent press release, or even by just uploading a new graphic. The most common error is to accidentally save an older version of the site over top of a newer version, thereby removing the new SEO elements that have contributed to higher rankings. This can be detrimental to the high ranking of the website, and will then be blamed on the search engine optimization company.

Even worse is the habit of businesses to use "test beds", which are damaging once the site goes live. Since these test beds aren't meant to be crawled by search engine spiders, responsible web masters will usually place a code on the site telling search engines not to crawl there. Though most search engines will acknowledge that code, this does become a serious problem when the code is accidentally transferred over to the live site while updating. And, unfortunately, as effective as a search engine company's efforts may have been, it will likely get the blame for the lack of results - even when the code had nothing to do with them.

- Linking to other sites, especially through link exchanges. Though these may sound like great ideas - especially when offered one so readily by email - these link exchanges can be damaging, as they do sometimes defeat the purpose of link popularity strategies. Indeed, a link exchange is better than no link at all, but it really is the inbound links that count as the "points" toward your site's ranking. Since inbound links mean that someone has felt that linking to your site is worthwhile, link exchanges are seen more as a trade-off where each link negates the other one. Furthermore, you need to have a great deal of trust in the sites to which you link. If you link to a penalized site - especially when your link is placed on that site, too - your site may also be penalized.