Classic Web Marketing Mistakes

1. The Wrong Traffic - Great work your website is receiving hundreds of visitors. But have you asked yourself if they are the type of visitor you want? Make sure your advertising/marketing efforts are targeted are the right audience. For search engine marketing this means making sure your keywords and other meta tags reflect the true content of your business, otherwise you'll be disappointing both your visitors and yourself.
2. Single Keywords - Single keywords rarely describe your product or service in a meaningfull manner so they aren't going to generate visits. Instead use keyword phrases which accurately reflect the theme of your website and the page they are on.
3. Sloppy Site Design - Even if you get the visitors through good marketing. They'll be gone quick as a flash if your site is not up to scratch.
4. External Links - These are essential. Many small businesses don't have a links page as they feel their visitors will desert them. Not so. Google, for example, looks at the quantity and relevancy of links coming in and out of all websites to determine its 'Pagerank' and how high a site appears in search results. So exchange links with sites similar in theme to yours - go for quality rather than exchanging links with everyone, remember if its not relevant to your small business then its not relevant to your customers.
5. Spam - This is the surefire way of getting your site blacklisted from the major search engines. Never ever resort to this nasty method to get noticed.
   
6. Magic - Never use magic methods of increasing your site rank. The search engines are all ready ahead of you in most cases and if they aren't yet they will be soon. As soon as they are you can bet you will be banned by them and getting un-banned is a lot of hard work. Examples such as overusing multiple 'doorway' or 'gateway' pages (small pages of text, stuffed with keywords) are a surefire ways to get your site banned.
7. Bad Code - After the search engine robots have visited your site, they'll see the meta information first, then they'll scan your page for the first chunk of relevant text. A large number of sites have cluttered code (Javascript usually) after the meta tags. Either have a re-think and move the javascript, or place any code in a separate file on your server, and 'include' it in your web page.
8. Patience - From a standing start building up your website traffic takes quite a lot of time. Not only is Google rumoured to implement a 'sandbox' on new sites to deter spammers (new sites typically take several months to be ranked correctly), but link building and publicising your site to others is an ongoing and essential process. Like any marketing web marketing as an ongoing activity and if you look at it that way and avoid the classic mistakes mentioned here, you should save yourself quite a bit of time and the rewards should come.