1) Don’t assume you will be able to optimize your site entirely on your own. Do an analysis of your business and its major keywords. Are you going to be able to rank on highly competitive keywords on your own? Should you hire an SEO company? This decision needs to be made early in the process, not later.

2) Don’t begin your website design and development without considering an SEO plan. Do complete a keyword analysis first and determine what kind of keyword-rich content you will need to develop in order to rank highly. Make sure your designer knows which keywords are going to be targeted on each of the pages they will design – it makes it easier for them to match the overall theme of the content and keywords to the sites design, broadening the SEO reach.

3) Don’t forget about your secondary pages. In many cases these pages can rank just as well as your main home page. Do spend ample time developing these pages.

4) Don’t repeat the keywords you have within your main page title tags on your secondary page title tags. Do spend time developing separate keyword-rich title tags that match the content to the keywords you are targeting on your secondary pages.

5) Don’t list your company or domain name first in your title tags. Most likely, you are already ranking well for your own company or domain name. Do place your company or domain name at the end of the title tag if you absolutely need it to appear within the search engine results.

6) Don’t target general, highly competitive keywords. Do target keyword derivatives that get traffic and are not as competitive. It’s better to rank #3 for “effective website design” than #35 for “website design” even if the main keywords get more traffic. In the end, landing in the top 10 or top 5, even for less competitive keywords will generate more overall traffic.

7) Don’t forget about a sitemap and making your website search engine friendly and crawlable. Do submit your website to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer and take advantage of their resources.

8) Don’t make the mistake of driving all your incoming links to your main home page. Do create a balanced link program that not only generates incoming links to your main page but also to your secondary pages. If you have useful content or tools on your secondary pages, websites will link to them.

9) Don’t request the same anchor text on all of your incoming links, as this looks very unnatural to the search engines. Do offer anyone who wants to link back to you with a variety of anchor texts. And, of course, match the anchor text with those keywords you are targeting for that specific page. If at all possible, try to stay away from getting incoming links displaying your domain name. Instead, try to get people to link to you with keywords and keyword phrases.

10) Don’t assume you can complete an initial SEO campaign and think you are done. Do perform regular and ongoing keyword research to make sure you are still targeting the correct keywords; perhaps there are new keywords to target? Do follow up on your link requests and maintain an ongoing link campaign. Do implement an analytics program and track the amount of traffic you are generating from the organic search engine listings. Are these visits leading to sales or conversions? If so, it’s in your best interest to up your SEO efforts and ride the momentum.

There are many mistakes that webmasters and website owners make when implementing a new or ongoing SEO strategy. That’s why it is difficult garnering and maintaining organic listings on the major search engines. While this is only a sample of some of the more common mistakes, this list should provide you with a starting point of how to begin and what questions to ask your SEO firm when considering to hire them to manage your SEO efforts.

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