1. No keyword research – writing or even pricing websites prior to doing any keyword research is a fundamental sin – if you don’t know what users check for on the web how can you approach to write a website that meets visitors demands let alone recognize the effectiveness of your challengers. It will have the same effect as you standing near the fast lane of a main road holding a postal-card.

2. No contender research – you wouldn’t put an advertisment in the yellow pages without testing to see who’s publicizingadvertising in the crucial component and how big their add is – yet most of us would have a website written without looking at how good/bad your contenderwebsites are or how many backlinks they have assembled. Ok I can hear the SEO’s shouting its all about backlink quality – yes but without a rudimentary guide you wont know whether your site 1 competitors  have 30 or 30,000 links to their page on intermediate – for example the term professional website design has 249 million pages listed in Google and moneysupermarket who’s number one has 306,000 backlinks – any professional website design corporations fancy their chances – contact me with a bag full of money! My point is: be informed, be realistic and before you publish a website decide on good niche terms where you have some chance of making page 1 or 2 of SERPs.

3. Lack of Articles – do you seriously intend to outrank your rival with a 5 page website when your competitor’s site has 100s of keywords relevant webpages? A lot of people believe they can – it’s a frequent illusion. Check your  competitors websites in Google with site:domainname.com and publish plenty of good content.

4. Lack of Internet Site Preparation – if you don’t plan your pages then you will miss things out. Everything ought be planned: page names, directory names, titles, headings, footers, menu text, link text & paragraphs, razor-sharp graphics as well as general position of items on page. Very good planning – leads to good keyword prominence & avid usability.   

5. No time/budget for merchandising – internet designers are all to keen to take their clients dollars but fail to educate customers that unless their market domain is un-contended it’s implausible that the customer will rank purely on conception & keywords. Thus if your aim is to pen down a website to receive some business and haven’t got a fair marketing plan or search engine marketing budget then take your friends/family on a good vacation and lay to rest the website – income better spent!

6. Using Known spoiled parts – such as frames, excess script, flash intros, thick graphics may result in longer page load times and fat HTML. Its best practice today for designers to make use of text based link menus, external cascading style sheets to minimize on page code  & enhance keyword density.

7. Missing Keywords in H1 H2 H3 H4 – search engines such as Google try to deliver web sites with text corresponding to the keyword/s typed. Keywords in headings are rated as of higher importance than keywords in sentences but both are crucial – this is often forgotten.

8. No Dedicated Landing Pages – for instance if the corporation you are writing a website for is a web design company – other than your home page – its is good practice to write a separate pages about web design & any other specialties such as AJAX web design, adult web design etc. Visitors will expect to see content relating their search term – thus a landing page that matches the bill is exactly what the doc ordered – if your website lacks these do something about it.

9. Lacking or Sparely used Titles – title tags are commonly overlooked by web developers & where these are filled they are most commonly done in a rush – ‘artviper Blog’. Title tags appear on title bar of your browser window & are commingly on line 1 of organic SERP listing therefore are vital and should incorporate your most commonly used keywords – filling these in thoughtlessly is in-fact worse than leaving these blank. Titles should not be longer 65 chars the word that crosses that limit and any further words will not be indexed (in Google anyway).

10. Lacking or Crappy Used Description Meta – webdesigners often don’t pay any attention to the description meta tag – this tag usually shows up on line 2 of an organic search engine position listing hence is fairly important. Using correct keywords here helps towards SERP ranking – filling descriptions without any targeted keywords is in-fact worse than leaving these blank. Description Meta should not exceed 150 characters the word that crosses that limit and any further words will not be indexed(Google).

11. Bad Use Of Site Names – this again is all too common, if a page is about web design then name is ‘web-design’ or ‘web_design’ and try to avoid joining words: webdesign. Correctly named pages count towards good SERP positions by supporting to cross the message as to what the page is about.

12. Avoid Image based Navigation – while some designers are aware of this there is still a minority that use anchored pictures – Google reads internal anchor text when indexing sites & this adds up towards the overall SERP positions – keep off it but if you have to use it then use alt tags..

13. Bad Positions of Keyworded Headings – your most important keyworded slogan should appear near the top of the page, this seems normal yet is all too often forgotten – sometimes referred to as keyword prominence.

14. Bad use of Colours – yea Dulux are right you do need an eye for colour – preferably no more than 3 colours for your theme, take care though as certain colours have major importance in some countries – keep off luminous colour themes. If you don’t have access to Adobe Illustrator (has a neat colour match tool) then type HTML colours or mooColorfinder in your preferred search enigne and you will find a few neat utilities.

15. Poor Layout & Script Control – OK if you only have a few pages to write then its ok to write pages in Vanilla X/HTML – just bear in mind that you will get to a point where you will need to make some layout or menu changes and then you will have to do this to every page – moan! Most developers today use the likes of PHP or ASP – in this way layout & script changes can be applied to one or many documents simultaneously thus cutting down workload. Vanilla HTML is painful on bigger sites.

16. Avoid Page Building Programs – many programs will create a pre-designed website however unless you are certain that the code generated is meets all good page building guidelines then stay clear many programs carry lots of hidden links back too themselves – the publisher needs some link love too! (There are a few programs that actually are not too bad)

17. Not Keeping to a theme – as of November 2000 many search engines use site themes as a method of indexing websites. This is where more than one page on the site is tailored to similar keyword/s. For example a site with the following pages leather shoes, beach shoes, school shoes would be indexed as a site about shoes – the objective by search engines here is to deliver websites that match the term searched ahead of single pages, hence not conveying the right message throughout the pages of the website could result in lower position in SERPs – many websites today fail to stick to a theme.

18. No Keywords in Domain Name – hence if you are writing a website for web design then it’s wise to have the term ‘web design’ as a part of the URL – whilst this is not essential but it does count towards your rank in SERPs

19. Poor Link Structure – just writing the pages is all very well if they are not found – most of the pages on your site should be accessible from any page – use top/side menus & footers to insure that all your pages are easily accessible.

20. No Follow Tags – if your web marketing professional does their job then you will have plenty of link love from other sites – hence any links from your page will distribute this link love through the links on your page (I’m getting confused) It is important not to pass any link love to pages that don’t matter ie pages like contact us, about us, terms. use the no follow tag on any such links. This way the user will still see the page as normal but spiders wont – easy really – use rel=”nofollow” in your anchors.

21. Stop Words in titles & Metas – such as: and, a, and, the, in, this, it, who, at – are all words that are not indexed in search engines – they have no meaning to search engines and are bypassed by crawlers – so avoid these in titles & meta tags, alt tags etc.

22. No Alt Tags for Images – where appropriate use alt tags on any images & use your keywords in these sensibly.

23. Wrong domain suffix – obvious really ie .co.uk for uk company – you will not rank well if you are trying to promote a .co.in to the UK. Here are come common UK domain suffixes:

.com – Commercial Site

.org – Non-profit organization site

.net – Site within a larger network.

.biz – Purely for Business-to-Business sites

.name – For identity purposes of an individual or organization

.info – Informational sites providing no e-commerce

.co.uk – Site based in the United Kingdom

.co.in – Site based in India

24. Hosting Overseas – Host your website in your home country ie use a UK host for .co.uk .com – for load speed as much as geolocation purposes – irrespective of how tempting overseas offers might be.

25. No redirect page – your website will change all the time – you will add and remove pages – visitors will on average visit your site 7 times before contacting you – hence seeing an 404 error is not good for business. This can be prevented by a custom error page which would give the user a page of your choice – hence making your site look more professional than your competitor.

Get yourself a real good website through professional website design, from a company that takes care of all aspects getting a successful internet presentation up and running.