1. Underestimating the SEO process

Optimizing your website is not like doing a restaurant makeover. A facelift changes the restaurant's face but not its menu. If your menu caters to search engine's tastes of yesteryears, don't be surprised if no one comes to your restaurant. Search engine algorithms change. So you have to use SEO tools all over again to improve your page rank.

2. Expecting instant results

One way to improve your link popularity is to exchange links. Although link farms can trade links with so many sites, Google only places weight on these links on your site if they each of them are ranked well. So, having hundreds of low ranked sites only minutely benefits your page rank. If you thought this would work immediately, then you have much to learn. Some good things take time.

3. Hiring SEO people and leaving it at that

If you don't background check your SEO services team, they could use questionable tactics to improve your site's page rank. If your website gets flagged, the people you hired won't be taking the heat. You will.

4. Submitting your site's url to various search engines

The theory is that, by doing so, you won't have to wait for search engines crawl the web to find your site. This is vintage strategy, good only for nostalgia among SEO veterans. These days, a crawler will find your site (anyway) when it crawls a site that links to yours.

5. Making your site tough to crawl

The idea is to let search engines easier to find. You won't be helping if you have sessions IDs, or incorrect robots.txt file, or if your navigation menu is too screwed up for a crawler to make sense out of. Another way to get this wrong is to have an all AJAX, or all graphic site, or one filled only with Flash.

6. Relying on the shotgun keyword tactic

If your site is about losing weight, you're not going to improve your page rank if you use broad keywords, like "lose weight." Be specific. Use SEO tools to find alternate, related to, but specific keywords to "lose weight." Like "lose double chin." You want targeted traffic so you want targeted keywords.

7. Using late 1990's SEO tactics, like putting keywords in meta tags, in the alt tags of images, or in your page footer (hidden by color or just hidden). Today, these are referred to as spam.

8. Having similar a title element page after page

Google is high up on punishing duplicate content. Duplicate contents don't rank up high in the search results, so vary your page content and imbue it with relevance.

9. Ignoring user interface, after all the search robots are key

In the race for page ranking, sometimes the people who actually view the site are neglected. So we have optimized sites that don't visually make sense. A first time visitor has no idea how to navigate in the main page. There are no descriptive link texts. The site structure is off-putting.

10. Skipping out on placing useful content

If your site sells small coffee mugs about which there's very little to say, that doesn't mean your site can't be filled with good content. Ask for customer testimonials. Put them there. Add in a historical glossary about your product. Put up a comments forum. Make sure there's a feedback form, an "about" page, and so on.

11. Getting an unbalanced link status

Since links are thought to be what search engines look for as page rank indicators, people traded links with everyone else--including those sites that are low on page ranking and are not relevant to their own site in terms of audience and theme. Links are ok if they're relevant, but if your inbound links are link farming results, the tug to your page ranks is too small.

12. Thinking that if more people see your url, they'll visit your site

In an attempt to lure everyone to your site, you leave your url on every blog comment, on every tag board, on every guestbook, on every forum post, and on every email you send. Spamming is not among the usual SEO tools for a reason: it's plain annoying.

13. Repeating keywords on every page even when they don't make sense to a human reader

Sure, your keywords would have to be in the page title, page copy, and description meta tag. That's good for crawlers. But repeating keywords for "keyword density" is both annoying and is a tactic that's obsolete. Would you like to read the keywords "how to sleep better" in a 350-word article 12 times?

14. Worrying over your site's Google Page Rank

The Google toolbar has this 1-10 Page Rank scale that's misleading. The ranking shown there is months old and is not anymore an indication of how high your site turns up in search engines. Focus instead on your content, focus on having regularly updates keyword-targeted content, focus on how to improve your link popularity. So stop checking your page rank everyday.

15. Resolving your www.yourdomain.com and your domain.com on your home page

Obviously these will look like two separate things to a search engine (but have the same content), and what appears to a search engine as duplicate content is pretty much that: duplicate content that ranks low in search results.

When you use overaggressive SEO tactics, and get caught, your site suffers lost traffic, your business, a decline in revenue, and your company, bad press. Getting banned in search engines (the worst case scenario) means you've lost money, and spending more to get back in the page rank game? You've just lost more.

Paying for SEO services to improve your pagerank is an investment. Your online business prospers or perishes depending on adequate search engine optimization. But when the people you hired use unethical or amateurish strategies, you're bound to lose more when search engines punish your site.

Here's how to stay clean in rising in the page rank game:

1. Know everything there is to know about SEO. Two reasons; first, search engines continuously change their algorithms to adjust to abusive SEO tactics, in order to have a fair environment of competition. Second, your site will be penalized when caught in its unethical SEO methods--even if you're ignorant of those methods or the resulting penalties.

2. If you plant to do your site's SEO, be wary of information you rind on blogs, forums, and chatrooms. Outdated SEO tactics are ineffective, and aggressive but amateurish attempts to improve your pagerank could get your site penalized. Either you had better study SEO for a time, or find professionals to do it for you. This way you stay clean and you won't be risking your company's money and name.

3. Background-check the SEO people you'll hire. You might be hiring amateurs posing as experts, or experts but of the black hat variety. Look up their previous clients. Check references. Clarify the strategies they will use. They may cite all the SEO buzz phrases--jumping up the page ranks, how to improve your link popularity, SEO tools--and promise you results while being secretive of their methods. That's a sign they are no different from all that spam you receive: they're bad for you. The point is to avoid naively hiring unethical SEO practitioners.

4. Stay away from using, and don't hire SEO people who employ cloaking, duplicate content and micro sites, keyword stuffing, use of hidden text, site submissions to various search engines, and dependence on link farms. These tactics abuse how the search engine works, some of these are already obsolete, and sites that undergo this kind of malpractice are often eventually penalized.

5. Stay honest. Good, well-written, relevant, routinely updated content, with targeted keywords, will improve your page rank, and will improve your link popularity. Having content that's using the keywords that spiders can crawl on, and are inside text that keep visitors interested will both gain you ranking and recommendations.

Other clean tactics include having site navigation the spiders and users find intuitive, good use of title and meta tags, having your links on popular sites, paid inclusion to search engines, and pay per click.

The point is that when you see the benefits of clean SEO compared to the hassles and hazards of unethical SEO, there is more reason to stay clean.

If you plan to venture into an online business, or are studying to improve your pagerank yourself, then you want to know how to increase traffic to your site. One popular indicator of SEO attempts is the near-mysterious Google Page Rank. But did you know that there are more myths than what your page rank tells you? This article shows you some of the most prevalent.

* If your site ranks high, then it means you have a ton of traffic. Wrong. Page rank has no correlation with how much traffic goes to your site. Think of page rank as the measure of how popular a site is. Actually, a lot of websites get a lot of traffic and yet are at the bottom rung of page ranks. This means that page rank is just another SEO tool whose utility shifts with changes in search engine rules.

* If you take part in a link farm, a free link-swapping practice that (allegedly) tries to improve your pagerank, Google will punish you. There's a difference between an SEO tactic that borders on abusive, and an SEO tactic that's ineffective. Links farms, as a way to improve your link popularity is neither effective nor taken seriously by Google.

* Your site will get penalized if you use free articles. The theory is that free articles are free, so then more people will grab them, and then since Google punishes "xeroxed" content, there goes your page rank. Untrue! Think of all those news sites that get their content elsewhere. Using free articles is okay so long as you don't use it to fill thirty to forty percent of your site.

* Since reciprocal links don't affect your page rank, then this means the reverse, one way links, will improve your pagerank. This remains debatable. Google can tell when your site has links you put there yourself, or unnatural links--links placed there to deliberately fool search engine spiders to think that that site is popular. So one work around in search engine optimization is to place links where there are no link-back opportunities.

One example is the comments people leave on blog posts and forums. They can leave their sites' urls. But here in lies the debate, what if you're deliberately trying to keep leaving comments (with your url) on every page you encounter? This could also be a kind of unnatural links. If spotted by Google, then your page rank goes down. The best way to make a one way link to upload fresh content good enough that people will want to link to it.

* Using Google Site Maps boost your page ranking. Don't even think about it. Site maps are just another way for Google to index your site. That's it.

* Taking part in Google Adsense and Adwords raise your page ranking. The idea seems to be that since Google is the one using your site's url in their ads, your page rank increases. Wrong. According to Google, taking part in their ad programs doesn't affect search results.

* Hidden links and lightly colored (so as to be hidden) text on your page raises your page rank. This is spamming and is an unethical tactic not usually worth the punishment of getting banned.

There you have it. Use of these tactics is often the result of poor research and amateur SEO people. So avoid using them and avoid hiring SEO services that use them.