Any organization that you go to, you’ll find about 99% of its employees don’t know anything about SEO. I have talked to marketing managers, directors, and senior vice presidents who have no clue about how search engine optimization is done. But the funny thing that I have notices is that after 10 minutes of discussion about on-page SEO tactics that they could use to improve their sites, I almost always get this brilliant feedback.

“I have a great idea! Why don’t we just change the color of the text that you are suggesting to white. That way we don’t hurt the customer experience and make search engines happy.” So why is hidden text such a popular idea among marketers:

• Low Risk: hiding the text looks low risk to most people. Your copy doesn’t have to be perfect if you hide it. Besides, you can probably put things in there that you normally wouldn’t (if the text was visible).
• Damage Control: you don’t know what adding a paragraph of text would do to your customers. They may leave and don’t come back (it depends on the content you put on your site). So why not mitigate the potential damage by not showing them anything at all?
• Greed: everybody gets greedy sometime. You want to have everything and pay nothing. We all want to have our cool flash sites and put pretty images on our pages and avoid anything that search engine might like.
• Ego: everybody wants to be a genius. We all have egos and if we find some solution that no one has tried before, it will make us feel good. But here is the thing. There got to be a reason why people don’t use these so obvious tactics, right? Not everyone’s stupid!

Some of these obvious mistakes are just due to lack of proper knowledge. I really don’t blame people who suggest these ideas, but sometimes the top guys go ahead with these ideas without talking to a professional SEO. Now that’s when you can get into trouble.