If you have a website then you already know importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It's only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.Usually owner or designer of website is person designated to drive traffic to site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it's going to cost you. Using search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is least expensive method known.
Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a "pretty" website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site...after all, isn't that what you want.
1. Not using keywords effectively. This is probably one of most critical area of site design. Choose right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.
2. Repeating same keywords. When you use same keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) search engines may downgrade (or skip) page or site.
3. Robbing pages from other websites. How many times have you heard or read that "this is Internet and it's ok" to steal icons and text from websites to use on your site. Don't do it. Its one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.
4. Using keywords that are not related to your website. Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as "sex", name of a known celebrity, hot search topic of day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn't have anything to do with page topic. However, since keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by search engines and may cause page (or sometimes whole site) to be removed from search engine listing.