If you search the Internet, you can find at least a few dozen lists that outline the common mistakes a newbie SEO might make. Just to make sure I don’t leave out the obligatory list, I’ll present it below. After that, however, I’ll detail what really happens when a beginner starts to see results from his or her first search marketing experiments.

Obligatory List of Common SEO Mistakes

• There is little or no text on the page. This makes it very difficult for a search engine to decide what the page might be about.
• The page has enough text, but it isn’t using any keyword phrases within it that a user might be searching for.
• The page title either lacks a kicker keyword phrase, is the same as every other page title on the site, or both.
• The page content, or meta tags, or alt tags, or any other portion of the code is filled with keyword stuffing.
• Either hidden text or hidden links exist on the page.
• The page uses old-school framesets.
• The site uses javascript, flash or images for navigation making it difficult or impossible for spiders to follow the links.
• The site utilizes cloaking to fool search engines.
• The site links to bad neighborhoods.
• The site’s internal links use phrases such as ‘click here’ as anchor text.
• The site blocks robots from spidering in either the robots.txt file or in page meta robots tags.
• The site is one big flash site.
• The site’s backlinks are completely dependent upon nothing but reciprocal links with anyone and everyone.
• The webmaster or SEO thinks toolbar pagerank is the be all, end all goal, and does nothing but chase the dream of higher pr.

Now that we’ve gotten the obligatory list out of the way, let’s talk about what I’ve seen time and time again. I’m talking about the over-enthusiastic noob SEO. This person is so excited about his new profession that he inevitably crosses over the imaginary “gone too far” line – again and again and again.

“Oh look”, thinks the noob, “putting that keyword phrase in the first paragraph of text bumped my rankings up a little bit. Hey, I know! I’ll put that phrase in the text another 50 times! Yeah! That’ll work great!”

or…

“Oh look”, thinks the noob, “that link I paid for from that directory made my ranking go up from #493 to #487. If I just buy another 300 or so links, I’ll be golden!”

or…

“Wow, I”… [insert anything here] … “and my rankings went up a teeny tiny bit, so if I ” … [do whatever that was] … “another million times, I’ll be #1!”

Sure, in a perfect world, we would discover something that search engines appreciate, and we would apply the old “Rinse and Repeat” formula to further that appreciation. In the real world, however, it inevitably tends to lead to more of a “Gone Too Far” situation that search engines almost never appreciate.

Some key advice to anyone new to search engine optimization:

• Make sure you don’t intentionally or accidentally prevent spiders from reading your content and following your links.
• Make sure there is enough text on each page to keep a spider fully informed about the page. In doing so, make sure to actually use the words and phrases that a user might search for when researching the topic you’ve written about.
• Never use “tricks” designed to fool search engines such as cloaking or hidden (or nearly hidden) text.
• Be careful who you link to. If you think a site might not be on the best of terms with a search engine, either don’t link to it, or render the link neutralized by using rel=”nofollow” as a link attribute.
• Most of all, use common sense. If it might be “too good to be true, it probably is”. If it might look silly to a user, it will probably look silly to a search engine. If it isn’t useful to a user, it probably won’t be useful to a spider.
• Finally, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. There are millions of wanna-be SEOs who’ll guide you down the wrong path. Use common sense in those situations as well.