Mistake #1 Not checking that their site is search engine friendly before submitting make sure that your pages all have:

appropriate and descriptive titles, good copy that is written for people and not search engines, made sure that all of the pages in the site can be accessed by the search engine, e.g. don’t use Flash or JavaScript as the only way to navigate between pages in the website

Mistake #2 Not having effective links from other websites before submitting

Search engines make significant use of links between websites to evaluate the quality of the content of the site. Obtaining links from other websites can be a time consuming process. It is recommended that you implement a system that involves these stages:

Locating relevant websites and assessing their suitability to obtain links to your site Write to the owners of these sites with an offer to exchange links. It is wise to have already added the link to their website first and draw their attention to this. Follow up in 14 days if you have not heard back from the site owner, and Drop their site from your links page if you have not heard back in 30 days

Mistake #3 Not having a system to monitor when search engines are updating their databases

If your site is larger than just a few pages, there is a good chance that your site will not have every page on it included in every search engine’s database. Additionally you should identify how frequently your site is being updated in the search engine. If you have added new content to your website or have changed the existing content, it can take a month or so for this to be reflected in the database of the search engines. Once your site has a higher credibility in the search engines this will occur more frequently.

Mistake #4 Not testing the keywords, copy and headlines of the web pages

All major search engines now offer some form of paid placement advertising. This is a useful tool to testing which keywords and advertising copy works best to attract sales. The key advantage of using paid placement advertising is that a large number of tests can be conducted in a relatively short period of time to determine the best combination of keywords, offer, headlines, copy, etc that suit your site.

Only after you have identified which particular keywords are suitable for optimizing pages on your site should you then start to fine tune your web pages to rank highly against these keywords. You should also test headlines in your advertisements and these headlines be added to the titles of your web pages.

Mistake #5 Not having a system to monitor and measure the effectiveness of their search engine listings and website

Search engine marketing is a continuous process that involves far more than simply obtaining high ranking positions. You need to constantly monitor how many people visit your website from search engines, what keywords they are using, how many of them convert into a sale or sales lead, etc. The secret to success is test, test, test and test again.