Matt Bailey has put up a great blog post this week that not only summarizes three common search marketing related mistakes made by big businesses, but also features a 48 slide Power Point Presentation that he delivered at the Direct Marketing Association's ACCM conference for catalog retailers in Boston yesterday. While the PowerPoint doesn't have quite the punch that it would with Matt narrating it, there's still some great information in there worth considering.

So what does Matt think the three biggest mistakes are? Well, to briefly summarize his full post...

Top Three Mistakes:

1. Branding comes before marketing tactics.

2. Call things what they are.

3. The basis of optimization is the customer experience.

From the structure of a web page and how each search engines view each area of content to keyword research and the need to target the long tail, Matt's presentation covers the basics of search engine optimization while helping businesses to remember that the customer plays an even more important role than the search engines do.

Target one without considering the other? You're dead in the water.

Find a way to make both happy? Start planning for that vacation home in Costa Rica.