This is guest post by Deborah Dera, who works for online degrees, You can also write for TechMaish. Read Guest Blogging.

The quest for an SEO-friendly blog or website is one every webmaster wishes he could conquer. The truth, however, is that in our initial quest to learn all we can about SEO, many of us make mistakes. We think we’re helping ourselves when we are, in reality, not helping Google to find or love our websites. Here are a few mistakes you’ll want to avoid.

Bad Keyword Choices

One of the biggest mistakes new marketers make is choosing their keywords based on what they think people are using to search for related topics. They think they’re being descriptive but they haven’t done any real keyword research and have no idea what terms to target. Not doing good keyword research upfront is like committing SEO-suicide and its one step you simply can’t skip.

Forgetting Keyword Diversity

When attempting to rank your page you should have a series of keywords and phrases to target – not just one. Having only one link looks unnatural and makes it difficult to build a wide variety of backlinks from other sites. You need to diversify your linking strategy by choosing a wide variety of keywords and phrases so that you can boost your search engine rankings from several angles.

Hiding Backlinks

Let’s be frank. Hiding backlinks may seem like a grey-hat (questionable but not sinful) technique but it is something you should simply avoid. Google hates it when you hide things on pages. Hiding keywords and backlinks makes it look like you want to stuff your page without people realizing it. The worst part is that while the average person browsing the web can’t see things you’ve made invisible, Google bots can. Hiding backlinks can seriously hurt your rankings and is something you should avoid completely.

Search engine optimization is crucial to the success of your website but will only work if you handle it properly. Avoid these common mistakes and your website will be well on its way to higher rankings.