Links are one of the most important factors when it comes to successfully optimising a business blog or website.

According to Yahoo Media technical marketing director Laura Lippay, search engine optimisation is a lot easier for firms if their site contains high-quality external links, is being linked to by their users or their online content is being shared.

It won't have escaped your notice that we have started a new year and a new decade, so with this in mind lets take a look at setting a new standard for your website and it's SEO. The first thing to do is to look at the most common SEO mistakes so we can develop a plan to avoid them. For most businesses, web presence has become or is becoming an essential interface between customers, clients and your business function. Leaving aside paid advertising as a method of reaching your potential market most of us find a better conversion and ROI using organic search rankings as the primary method used to find your company, products, or services. Whether it's Google, Bing, Yahoo or another search engine that people use to find your website the way your site is optimised for search engines has a direct and fundamental effect on how you are ranked by the search engines.

The top five most common mistakes made are as follows.