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One of the more awkward SEO mistakes is nearly hidden text. Most people are aware that putting something like white text on a white background is hidden text and has been a big "no no" in search engine marketing for a very long time.

But what is nearly hidden text?

Sometimes it can be an attempt to get around the search engine penalties for using truly hidden text by putting the text items as a slightly different colour from the background colour.

Other times it can be an innocent mistake by a graphic designer who wants bits of your site to fade into the background (or occasionally to look "super cool").

Whether your intent to deceive the search engine was deliberate or not doesn't matter. What matters is that the computer that you'd dearly love to index your site and place it high up in the search results thinks that you're trying to fool it.

It's pretty safe to assume that Google has been around long enough to know how close a colour needs to be to another one in order to be near enough invisible.

And don't think that hiding colours in your site's CSS code that controls the look and feel will work. Again, Google is too long in the tooth to accept this.

There are also times when your nearly hidden text is actually only nearly hidden if someone is suffering from a particular form of colour blindness. Most of us are blessed with full colour vision so we tend to forget about those people who don't see the full spectrum of colours or who only see in black and white.

For them, nearly hidden text could simply mean that the contrast of the text makes it difficult to read.

Another way the text on your web page could become close to hidden is if your graphic designer has picked a background image that is so overpowering that it makes anything written on it difficult to read. The annoying kind of site where you either have to figure out how to turn images off on your browser or - more likely - drag your mouse over the screen so that the text changes colour and hopefully makes itself more readable.

One other thing to watch out for is using inadvertently hidden text. Colours on different monitors vary considerably. Even without allowing for the angle they're being viewed at. What looks readable on one monitor can be almost impossible to read on another one. This isn't easy to check unless you've got several PCs close at hand but is definitely worth looking into. In this case whether Google would classify it as nearly hidden text is probably secondary to the fact that your actual site users would click the back button fast.

To avoid making this and other SEO mistakes it's worth getting your site checked over by an SEO expert.

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