1.     Forget your title tag

In the book of SEO, web design, basic usability and pretty much any 101 beginner’s guide you can find, you will be told to ensure your page title is correct. How often have you seen sloppy page titles like “index” or “homepage”?

2.     Use images for text

This is not only poor for SEO but it is also pretty damaging to site accessibility. Paragraphs should always be created using real text (except in very specific circumstances). If you must use a non-standard font, there are quite a few alternatives out there such as cufon.

3.     Use old “techniques”

Old and spammy SEO methods are well documented, and most people these days know to avoid them. But that doesn’t stop a few who still believe that doing things like hiding keywords in the page background will increase their rankings. It won’t, in fact it will get you flagged for trying to ‘fix’ the game.

4.     Big, fat lumbering websites

Google has indicated that it prefers websites that are fast loading and, where possible, semantically correct (meaning the code behind the page is readable and makes use of CSS/XHTML). We often see huge websites built on old content management systems that don’t rewrite URL’s, are loaded with ads and generally feel like a big old heffer about to keel over at any moment.

This is poor for your users and therefore, the search engines will take a very dim view also.

5.     Invaluable, spam blog comments

At one time blog commenting using keywords for your site title was regarded a good way to get backlinks. Some went even further by simply spamming the comments section with linked keywords.

I’m not sure what planet these people live on. Any active blog is going to remove these comments immediately, or simply deny them from being published. Spam comments are most likely down to automated comment bots, but the best way to drum up publicity and create exposure for your website is to write a useful and relevant comment using your own name. This way the comment will not be denied and who knows – people may even willingly visit your site because of it!