Mistake #1 -- Lack of W3C compliance
Old-school HTML was table-driven -- <table><tr><td></td>><td></td></tr></table> -- and was once the standard for website design. It sort of makes your head spin to think of all of the needless code, doesn't it? Font treatment was much the same. However, HTML and web development has evolved, and in turn, tables and other HTML techniques have become relics of the past.
What used to take 1,000 lines of code can now be done in 300, thanks to off-page CSS and JavaScript. Clean code really helps the search engines to better crawl a website. Abiding by W3C standards also helps ensure that search engines are able to crawl and index your content in the proper fashion.
Tables aren't completely taboo relative to W3C standards, but it's against best practice to use tables for anything other than tabular data. Failing to comply means that the search engines may not place your content in its proper context. Following W3C standards will also create other positive benefits on your site, such as cross browser compatibility and separating design and content layers, making your site easier and more efficient to manage and update, and increasing your keyword density from the major search engines' perspective.
A W3C-compliant site does not ensure good rankings by any means, but the difference between a poorly coded site and a W3C-compliant site can be enormous in the eyes of the search engine robots. To check if a site is W3C compliant, go here or here.
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