An online presence is becoming increasingly important as more and more people not only research products and services on the web, but also expect to be able to purchase them online as well. It goes without saying though that no matter how good your website is, without a proper strategy for getting targeted traffic to your site, you are not going to get a good return on your online investment.

Even companies that are aware of ways to get consistent traffic to their websites by using Search Engine Optimization strategies often fall into a number of traps and miss out on vital strategies that can help optimize their sites.

The three biggest search engine optimization mistakes that we repeatedly see people making are:

1. Not having enough content

Too many sites have pages on them that do not have enough content on the page. This is often the case on shopping type sites which may appear rich in terms of overall content (plenty of pictures and even videos) but inadequate in terms of text.

Worse, these pages can often be seen as duplicate or low quality pages by the search engines because the only text changes on the page are the product title, heading tags, and the price.

It is important to ensure that you have sufficient content on each page on your site and that the content differs significantly from that on other pages on the site.

2. Not using Internal and external Anchor Text properly

Too many sites that we encounter still use things like "more" or "click here" as the anchor text for many links, both on their own site and on external sites linking back. Even web designers, who should know better, often place a link on client sites saying website by John Doe Inc with 'John Doe Inc' as the anchor text. They would be far better changing the anchor text to a more suitable search term than their company name.

By putting some more thought into anchor text you can help the search engines to understand what the page being linked to is about.

3. Overuse of crawler unfriendly site elements

A large number of websites still sacrifice search engine optimization for a catchy design. This might be relevant if you are in an industry where you need to showcase your design skills and talents. However, if it is not relevant to your business then you can significantly reduce your sites SEO effectiveness by developing sites that have a homepage with just a flash movie or something similar.

While it is true that search engines will reward some use of different elements in your website, if these elements aren't incorporated with proper text, you're not going to win any points with the search engines. You also need to bear in mind that search engine crawlers rely on links on your page to navigate around your site. By using text and incorporating a site map you can go a long way to improving the SEO of your site.

So having read this list, have you noticed that you might be making some of these mistakes? And while these are some of the most common that we encounter there are many more mistakes that people are making out there.

Successful search engine optimization should be incorporated into a website from the design phase and not left as an afterthought once a site is live. It is much easier to build a search engine friendly website in the beginning, rather than having to go back and retrofit it later to improve SEO.