Internet Marketing: Why You're Not Getting Enough Respect From Search Engines

I came across this great summary article on search engine optimization pitfalls.  It summarizes the reasons why you may not be getting as much recognition on the pages of the major search engines on searches for phrases in your marketplace as you think you should:
1.  They cannot find you at all because it uses a spidering technology that only finds you through links to you from another site.  If you do not have any links from other sites that Google (and others) sees, then it will never find you.
2.  You have a lot of graphics or flash on your site which the search engines cannot see.  We often see sites that are very expensive with lots of graphics and flash that are interesting to look at, but no one gets to see them outside of the company's rolodex because the search engines cannot read that stuff.
3.  They cannot find some/most of your pages because the navigation buttons on your site are heavily coded.  I have noticed that this is the case with MANY of the website addresses entered into our website grader that have only one or two indexed pages vs 5-10 actual pages.
4.  They have trouble with your site because of the structure of your website address (url) string.
5.  If your website has less than 2500 words, then it is basically penalized by the search engines.  A one page word document has about 500 words on it, so if you have less than five total pages on your site, you probably are being penalized.
6.  The words in blue section at the top of your browser are your title tag which the search engines see as a key indicator as to what your site/page is about.  Many of the website addresses entered into our website grader have either nothing or just the name of the company/blog in the title tag, but they should contain words that describe your market/business that shoppers would search on.
7.  Your site is too new.  The search engines are increasingly considering the age and amount of time online of your site in their algorithm. 
8.  You do not have enough links coming into your site from websites that themselves have lots of links into them and who have similar content to yours.

If you want to see how you are doing on some of this stuff, you should run your site through our website grader.

-- Brian Halligan.