Last month, Microsoft unveiled their new search engine: Bing. Google has also recently made some changes to their search engine. This has caused some webmasters to scramble in order to react to the changes made by the search engines, trying to capitalize on new resources or temporary benefits. This just reminds me of the importance of keeping to the search engine best practices and not loosing sight of the importance of a fundamentally sound search engine strategy.

A good SEO campaign should always focus on methods to continually improve their results through solid optimization techniques and link building. One should also avoid behaviors and “tricks” that can result in penalties from the search engines — the so-called “black hat” techniques. Following these guidelines, you may not achieve the same short term success as some of your competitors, but it does ensure that your efforts in keyword strategies, link building and optimization aren’t wasted.

The following are a few areas where many make mistakes — and how to avoid them:

Redundant Keywords

The search engines will not rank your entire site for a long list of keywords. They rank individual pages. Targeting the same keywords on all of your pages simply means that you’re competing with yourself. Each page on your site should have its own keyword strategy. If two pages have the same keywords, this should tell you that either the content is potentially duplicated, or that the pages should be combined. By having a wider variety of keywords for each page, you are targeting a broader range of search terms. And don’t worry about some pages that may not be ranking well with some keywords. You’re never going to rank high for everything, so focus on the most important pages on your site and their keywords.

Use Off-Page CSS and Javascript

Off-page CSS and Javascript reduces the size of the HTML that Google has to crawl. It also reduces the amount of bandwidth that Google sucks up when they do crawl your site. Once again, making things easier on the search engines is in your own best interest. The less time and bandwidth Google spends digesting your content, the more they will like your site.

Keep Up With Search Engine Changes

The search engines are always updating their algorithms. This is for many reasons: competition between the search engines and trying to create a better service are chief among them. When the search engines make changes, it is sometimes a good idea to change the content of your site in order to adapt to those changes. Not doing so could cause you to inadvertantly miss out on beneficial changes, or worse, get you penalize for something that you didn’t realize was an incorrect optimization technique.

Getting Indexed

Let’s face it, if you aren’t getting indexed, you can’t get any ranking. Following all the techniques to get indexed does not really help you rank higher, but it does allow the search engines to find your content easier. The more you can do to help the search engines find your content, the more likely it is that you can get that content indexed and ranked.

Duplicate Content

One of the worst things you can do to harm your page rank is to have duplicate content. Try to keep your pages as “light” as possible, in other words small amounts of HTML. Yes, even the HTML of your page counts towards it’s content. And the more content you have that is the same on your pages, the more likely it is that the search engines will think you have duplicate pages. For example, having 500 bytes of HTML or CSS menus on all your pages and 300 bytes of content means each page is 800 bytes. But the majority of it (500) is the same. Google hates duplicate content. They have enough sites to index so they don’t want to see the same content over and over on your pages.

Bad Neighborhoods

Link building is one of the most important areas of your SEO strategy. But you need links from the right web sites. Do your homework on any site that you want to get links from. Check their SEO ranking and their practices. If they engage in black hat SEO techniques, you may be better off not using them. Once they’re discovered by the search engines, these sites quickly loose rank, and any links from them to your site could get you penalized by association. It’s better to not have a link from a web site than to have a link from a bad web site.

Redirecting Dead Pages

The best way to destroy your SEO campaign is to not redirect moved or non-existent pages. If you’re no longer using a page, be sure to redirect any SEO rank that the page may have enjoyed to another page. You earned it, so you might as well take advantage of it. Your new page may not get all of the ranking that your old page did, but it’s better than loosing all of the ranking for the old page. Never leave SEO ranking on the table! Worse than loosing the page rank is the customer perception. If a user follows a link from a search engine results page to your site and all they see is a “404 Not Found” page, they are very likely to leave and look elsewhere. So not only do you loose ranking, but you loose potential customers.

Poor Site Architecture

Your site’s internal link structure plays an important part in your ranking. Directing the flow of internal links to the most important pages, your “home” page or products page most likely, is paramount to making the site work. If the search engines have to follow multiple links to get to your important content they’re wasting time indexing pages that are not important to your site’s business. And if you have a very deep architecture it could also mean that customers have to follow many internal site links before they can even find your products. Customers will likely get bored before a search engine will and that means they’ll leave your site and go to your competitor.

Check your site for these common mistakes. If you don’t have any of them you deserve a pat on the back, but most sites are guilty of at least a few of them. Taking a little time to resolve these issues can and will go a long way to improving not only your site’s potential ranking, but in converting site visitors into customers. And let’s face it, you don’t have a web site who’s purpose is to just attract visitors. You want customers.