Everyone in marketing "has an opinion about how a website should look, function and complement offline marketing campaigns," says a post at the Resource Nation blog attributed to Geoff Kenyon, "but rarely does everyone have the online marketing experience to make the efforts successful." As a result, the initiatives they push might unwittingly damage—or even destroy—carefully cultivated SEO strategies.

So what do you do when your colleagues and leadership don't understand the havoc they might wreak when pushing for website changes? The post offers some advice on how to rebuff or mitigate dangerous actions like these:

• Changing domains. Your company might switch from one domain to another as part of a rebranding effort or to support a specific marketing campaign. "The problem with this is that when changing domains, all the link value associated with the previous domain can be lost. Using a brand-new domain means the value of the brand, on the Web, is effectively reset to zero," the post notes. If you can't dissuade your leadership from making the switch, make sure you add permanent 301 redirects at the page level.
• Focusing only on branded keywords. This approach works well if you want to reach customers who are already looking for your product. But what about those who aren't? The post points to Apple's wildly successful iPod, which also targets the generic phrase "play music" in its SEO campaign: "By targeting potential customers who aren't looking for an Apple product, they introduce their product as a solution for the user's problem." Using examples like that, you can fight back against a brand-centric keyword strategy.

The Po!nt: Stay alert and in the know. You can't always prevent offline decisions that negatively impact your hard-won online success, but you can find ways to reduce—or eliminate—the damage.

Source: Resource Nation.

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