A website can be a powerful marketing tool for small businesses.

Having a strong online presence can increase brand awareness and increase sales. The problem with website development is that everyone has a different opinion about how a website should look, function, and complement offline marketing campaigns, but rarely do website developers have the online marketing experience to make the effort successful.

Offline marketing decisions, such as re-branding, can have a significant impact on a company's web presence, but so can the ways in which the company's web presence is handled. Here are three mistakes to avoid, in order to maintain a healthy search engine optimization (SEO) campaign:

1.) Frequent Domain Changes: Some companies will change their domain name to match a marketing campaign or as part of a re-branding effort. The problem with frequent domain name changes is that all of the link value associated with the previous domain can be lost. Using a brand new domain means that the online value of the brand is reset to zero.

2.) Targeting Branded Keywords Only: One common mistake that many companies make is targeting only branded keywords. If only branded terms are targeted, then there will be very limited growth in online brand awareness. Typically, it is pretty easy to target both branded and non-branded keywords at once and that is the way to go.

3.) Leaving Re-design Remnants: Regular website re-designs can be helpful for businesses to better communicate a value proposition or a marketing initiative, but can be detrimental to an SEO campaign. When doing a website re-design, it is imperative that all URLs are kept the same. There is value associated with each URL of a company website; creating a new URL for the same content means all the link value associated with the content is lost.

Avoiding these types of mistakes, particularly when a company is re-branding itself, both online and offline will ensure smooth maintenance of an ongoing SEO campaign.

Copyright 2011 dzine it, inc. website marketing All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Although Google's search quality is better than it has ever been, in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness, the search engine giants says that it has seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months.

In this case, the spam that Google is targeting is commonly known as webspam, which refers to junk that appears in search results when a website tries to cheat its way into a higher position or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines. While Google says that it has, for the most part, successfully beaten webspam into submission, recent improvements have opened the door to trouble once again.

Google says that as the company has increased both its size and freshness in recent months, they have naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that, the search engine company recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spam content to rank high.

This new classifier is expected to be better at detecting spam on individual web pages, such as the sorts of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. Google says that it has also radically improved its ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010.

Google also says that the company is evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content.

'We'll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites,' said Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google in a recent blog post.

Cutts notes that as 'pure webspam' has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to 'content farms,' which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, Google launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites.

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