Everyone makes mistakes in their field and SEO is no different. Sometimes the mistakes are more costly than others but you need to learn from them and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

SEO Mistake 1 - Education. Learning online marketing has been tough starting from scratch and I’m the type of person who acts before thinking. I bought so many ebooks (which were good) and software (which also served their purposes) but I found out that you could get most of the information and tools online for free. Save your money and start participating in forums, sign up to free newsletters, ask people at forums where to get certain tools. You could even email me or leave a comment and I’ll tell you.

SEO Mistake 2 - Outsourcing jobs at cheap rates. Be very careful when you ask other people to do a job for you whether its through companies like rentacoder, elance, or through forums. Always check their background, sample jobs, and other peoples’ comments. It can waste so much time if they do the wrong job. Like they say, time is money.

SEO Mistake 3 - Starting a new website without planning. I always have crazy ideas on my mind and think to myself, ‘I better get things started before someone else steals my idea’. Not even bothering to research keyword competitiveness or trends, I go out there, buy a domain, hosting, and start uploading content, only to realize….no one even searches for this niche. I rank no.2 for a very common keyword and beat 3,000,000 other sites, but really who cares, if no one searches for the term. Takes a lot of time to beat 3,000,000 sites and get to the top of Google. You better know that there’ll be a heap of traffic for that keyword if you’re going to be committed to it.

SEO Mistake 4 - Lack of coding knowledge. Maybe more of a weakness but initially I found a way around this as I created my first site with a simple Mozilla interface which was pretty much like using Microsoft Word. No big deal. When I got to the point where I had about 200 pages, then the problems really began. One small change was such a hassle. I had to basically change all 200 pages because of minor glitches. Leave coding to the experts. Thank God for CMS (content management systems) like Wordpress, Joomla etc. In the meantime, I’m learning HTML and CSS as fast as I can.

SEO Mistake 5 - Follow Google Guidelines - Definitely the most costly mistake EVER. You never know with these big guns, the slightest mistake or glitch on your website could trigger any filter they have. It’s happened to many people and you don’t want to be wiped out of there SERPs after years of hard work on a website. Always focus on quality and no blackhat SEO techniques. Trust me, you don’t want this to happen to you. It’s almost impossible to get back into Google’s search engine.