The Internet is now the place 74% of consumers and 81% of businesses go when they are looking to buy; and the search engines are the number one place where they look. As business owners and managers, we have a moral obligation to our companies to make certain they place well in the search engine results. Optimizing your website to perform well in the search engines can yield a wide range of benefits. A properly optimized website will:

• Attract RELEVANT, high-quality traffic that's easier to convert into customers
• Generate leads or sales for your company
• Promote your company and Increase brand awareness 24/7 for relatively low cost.

The benefits could go on, but you get the point. Simply put, search engine marketing is essential for any company that wants to be successful online. But with so much conflicting information out there about how to optimize your website for maximum performance, you could be making costly mistakes without even knowing it.

Here are the 5 most common search engine marketing mistakes to avoid.

1. Choosing the wrong keywords-The keywords you choose are the backbone of your search engine marketing campaign. If you choose the right keywords, you'll attract quality traffic that consists of eager customers looking to buy your products and services. With the wrong keywords, you'll get low-grade traffic that just doesn't convert. Make sure your keywords are well-researched and relevant to the products and services you offer.

2. Not having enough content- There is a direct correlation between the amount of text in your website and the number of keywords your website can target. Too often, companies have a page with 2 or 3 paragraphs of text that they try to target to 5 or 6 keywords. If those keywords are competitive (and if they're not, why are you targeting them?) it won't work. The soft rule is that you need one page of text (300 to 500 words) to support each major keyword phase you want to target. The most competitive terms can require even more.

3. Writing only for visitors or only for the search engines-SEO copywriting involves targeting specific keywords in your website copy so that it will turn up in the search results when people search the keyword. Unfortunately, typical copywriters write only to the visitor and ignore good SEO techniques. Conversely, too many SEO copywriters get carried away with keyword targeting, and they overlook how humans read and interact with the content. You need a balance of both interesting and effective copy for the visitor and proper content optimization for the engines. Great SEO copywriting both pleases the search engines and converts human visitors into customers.

4. Not adding fresh content on a regular basis-The search engines love new, fresh content on your website. It shows them that your business is still kicking and doing well...separating your website from those here today, gone tomorrow spam websites. Consider adding a blog to your website; it is an easy way to provide fresh content on a regular basis.

5. Improper Naming of Page URLs-An SEO-friendly URL structure is essential for ranking well for the targeted keyword. For example, let's suppose you have a page on your website selling Gibson electric guitars. Your URL should look something like this: yourwebsite[.]com/gibson-electric-guitars. It should NOT look like this: yourwebsite[.]com/123?adt79.

Incorporate the main keywords into your URLs for a more search engine-friendly website.

Take a moment to grade your website. Look at it through the eyes of a potential customer. Would you buy from this website if you were a customer? If not, go back to the drawing board to correct your mistakes.

If you can avoid making these mistakes, you'll get much more out of your search engine marketing efforts.