Without doubt, most of us are constantly finding out new ways to improve our small business web marketing efforts - this is only natural. However, given that the Internet is jam-packed with sites which have run into all sorts of trouble in their quests to get noticed, I thought I'd list down some of the classic ways to ensure that your site will get no visitors whatsoever - reverse psychology perhaps!

1. Spam - The surefire way of getting your site blacklisted from the major search engines. Never ever resort to this nasty method to get noticed. Overusing multiple 'doorway' or 'gateway' pages (small pages of text, stuffed with keywords) are a surefire way to get your site banned by the search engines.

2. The Wrong Traffic - It's great if your website is receiving hundreds of visitors, but are they the type of visitor you want? Make sure your keywords and other meta tags reflect the true content of your business, otherwise you'll be disappointing both your visitors and yourself.

3. Single Keywords - Unless you're in some incredible niche marketplace where a single word can only be identified with your product with few competitors, single keywords aren't going to hit the bullseye in a traffic sense. Go for keyword phrases which accurately reflect the theme of your website and the page they're coded into.

4. Sloppy Site Design - There's no way around this one. Even if you get the visitors through good web marketing, they'll leave within seconds if your site is not up to scratch.

5. External Links - Absolutely essential. Many small businesses don't even have a links page as they feel their visitors will desert them. Not true. Google, for example, looks at the quantity and relevancy of links coming in and out of all websites to determine its 'Pagerank' and how high a site appears in search results. Exchange links with sites similar in theme to yours - go for quality rather than exchanging links with US-based casino software sites which have to relevance to your small business whatsoever!

6. Bad Code - After the search engine robots have visited your site, they'll see the meta information first, then they'll scan your page for the first chunk of relevant text. A large number of sites have cluttered code (Javascript usually) after the meta tags. Either have a re-think, or place any code in a separate file on your server, and 'include' it in your web page.

7. Watch out for SEO 'Experts' - There must be a million so-called 'search engine optimisation experts' out there. Make sure you know in advance exactly what you'll receive in exchange for their promises to boost your site traffic. There are plenty of good companies out there who can do the work for you, but seek recommendations from other small business people before making the decision. Bytestart contains a wealth of common sense information on how you can promote your site on your own. http://www.bytestart.co.uk/content/promotion/index.shtml

8. Patience - Building up your website traffic will take quite some time from a standing start. Not only is Google rumoured to implement a 'sandbox' on new sites to deter spammers (new sites typically take several months to be ranked correctly), but link building and publicising your site to others is an ongoing and essential process. If you look at web marketing as an ongoing activity and avoid some of the classic mistakes mentioned in this article, you should save quite a bit of time and the rewards should come.