1. Optimizing a site for the wrong keywords
The first step in any search engine optimization campaign is to choose the keywords for which to optimize a website. If the wrong keywords are chosen for your content and body text, all the time and effort in trying to get a site a high ranking will go down the drain. If keywords are chosen which no one searches for, or if the chosen keywords won't bring in targeted traffic to a site, what good will the top rankings do? However remember that keywords on their own are useless. Google has stopped paying any great attention to keywords in Meta Tags a few years ago.

2. Putting too many keywords in the Meta Keywords tag
Sites which have hundreds of keywords listed in the Meta Keywords tag, in the hope that by listing the keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, they will be able to get a high ranking for those keywords are waste of time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to popular opinion, the Meta Keywords tag has almost completely lost its importance as far as search engine positioning is concerned. Hence, just by listing keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, a website will never be able to get a high ranking.

3. Repeating the same keyword too many times
Another common mistake is to endlessly repeat target keywords in the body text pages and in Meta Keywords tags. Because so many have used this tactic in the past and still do, the search engines are monitoring all the time, and may penalise a site which repeats keywords in this way. Simply repeating the keywords endlessly no longer works.

4. Creating lots of similar doorway pages
Another myth is that since the algorithm of each search engine is different, they need to create different pages for different search engines. While this is great in theory, it is counter-productive in practice. Anyone using this tactic, will soon end up with hundreds of pages, which can quickly become a nightmare to control. Furthermore, although the pages are meant for different engines, they will actually end up being very similar to each other. Search engines are often able to detect if a site has created similar pages, and may penalise or even ban the site from their index. Instead of creating different pages for different search engines, create one page which is optimized for one keyword for all the search engines.

5. Using Hidden Text
Hidden text is text with the same colour as the background colour of your page. For example, if the background colour of the page is white and if white text is added to that page, it is considered as hidden text. Many webmasters, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, try to make their pages as keyword rich as possible. However, there is a limit to the number of keywords anyone can repeat in a page without making it sound odd to human site visitors.

Thus, in order to ensure that the human visitors to a page don't perceive the text to be strange , but still keyword rich, many webmasters add text (containing the keywords) with the same colour as the background colour.

This ensures that while the search engines can see the keywords, the human visitors cannot. The search engines have long since caught up with this technique, and ignore or penalise the pages which contain such text. They may also penalise the entire site if even one of the pages in that site contains such hidden text.

However, the problem is, that the search engines may often end up penalising sites which did not intend to use hidden text. For instance, someone has a page with a white background and a table with a black background. Further, some white text is in that table. This text will, in fact, be visible to human visitors, i.e. this shouldn't be called hidden text. However, the search engines can interpret
this to be hidden text, ignoring that the background of the table is black.

6. Creating Pages Containing Only Graphics
Search engines only understand text - they don't understand graphics. If a site contains lots of graphics but little text, it is unlikely to get a high rankings. To improving rankings, the graphics need to be replaced with keyword rich text or linked to ALT Text for search engine spiders to feed on.

7. Not using the NOFRAMES tag in case your site uses frames
Many search engines don't understand frames. For sites which use frames, search engines only consider what is present in the NOFRAMES tag. Many webmasters make the mistake of adding this to the NOFRAMES tag: "This site uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them". Search engines which don't understand frames, this is all the text that they ever get to see in this site, which means the chances of such a site getting a good ranking are non-existent.

8. Using Page Cloaking
Page cloaking is a technique used to deliver different web pages under different circumstances. People generally use page cloaking for two reasons: A) in order to hide the source code of their search engine optimized pages from their competitors and B) in order to prevent human visitors from having to see a page which looks good to the search engines but does not necessarily look good to humans. The problem is that when a site uses cloaking, it prevents the search engines from being able to spider the same page that users are going to see. And if search engines can't , they can no longer be confident of providing relevant results to their users. In case a search engine discovers that a site has used cloaking, it will probably ban the site forever from their index.

9. Using Automatic Submission Tools
In order to save time, many webmasters use an automatic submission software or service to submit sites and pages to search engines. It is true that submitting your site manually search engines takes a lot of time and automatic submission tools can help to time. However, search engines don't like automatic submissions and may ignore pages.

10. Submitting too many pages per day
Submitting too many pages per day to the search engines can be a mistake, and often results in search engines ignoring many of the pages which have been submitted from that site. Ideally, submitting 1 page per day to the search engines is enough. While many search engines accept more than 1 page per day from a particular domain, there are some which only accept 1 page per day.