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Monitoring Search Engine Positions

10 2008 Tuesday

By Filomena Serraino in Featured

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.

This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It’s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.

Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch “the market” closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn’t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor’s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.

This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present! People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html for a current list of website favorites.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.

It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.

Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign.

Filomena Serraino - Using one way links for your Web Promotion gets results. WHY? Link popularity is one of the most important factors in search engine performance. Increasing the number of links to your Website will get your site listed higher in search engine results, generating more Website Traffic, increasing your Google PR and improving your site’s overall strength. http://www.seolinkmart.com

Successful SEO Begins With Keyword Research and Analytics

09 2008 Tuesday

By Bill Platt in Featured

Many webmasters / online marketers make a common mistake when they begin doing business online. Often times, people do the processes necessary for their success - backwards. Rather than starting at the beginning and working forwards, they start at the end and work backwards. As a result, they waste more money and resources, often breaking the back of their business, well before they start to see any real success in their business.

Why Starting A Relationship With The Search Engines Can Be Hard

04 2008 Tuesday

By Erin Ferree in Featured

In a singles bar, patrons typically have the same sorts of insecurities running through their heads:

“I’ve been hurt before.” “Should I trust her?” “Can I let my walls down and let him in?”

These insecurities really get in the way of finding a happy, lasting relationship.

Search Engines have a lot in common with singles. They’ve been hurt, and they aren’t so quick to trust any more.

What You Need To Know About The Search Engines’ Pasts

Search engines have had a difficult relationship history. They’ve tried to be open-hearted and trusting. But unethical website owners, spammers, and other cheaters have used their trusting ways against them and worked their way into the top of the rankings with lies.

And search engines get hurt by that. Their job, above all else, is to help the people using them to search for information. When spammers rather than valid websites get to the top, the search engines can’t do their jobs well. That frustrates searchers, and the search engines don’t help them find what they need.

So how can you get the search engines to trust your website enough to list it? The answer is to know what they are looking for when you start a relationship with them.

Don’t just give them another line (of code)

The search engines no longer use the META Keyword tag when ranking your site. This tag is hidden at the top of your website’s HTML. It used to be one of the major areas the search engines looked at when determining what your site was all about.

The intent of this tag was for site owners to list words and phrases explaining what their sites were about. But it was rarely used in ethical ways. People would list terms they thought would help their sites come up in popular searches “free,” “money,” and “sex” were all popular back in the early days of the Internet.

After a while, this practice was so widespread that the search engines decided to do something about it. They stopped looking at this tag at all.

These days, the most common use of the META Keyword tag is your competitors researching your optimization strategy. If you already use a META Keyword tag, consider having it removed. If you’re coding or optimizing your website, leave it off and concentrate on putting your keywords in the body text of your website instead where they belong.

They want you to put all your cards on the table.

A while ago, some website owners decided they wanted to have very little copy on their sites. They still wanted to come up strong on the search engines. The search engines were no longer really looking at the META tags. The problem was how to have a site that looked as though it had very little text but still had enough information for the search engines to give it a good ranking.

Some of these website owners came up with what they thought was a brilliant solution. They’d add more text to the site at the bottom of the page below the copyright. And they’d make this text the same color as the background which basically meant that it was invisible to human website visitors. But the search engines would still see it in the code, read it, and count it toward their ranking.

The search engines caught on to this little trick pretty quickly. If they catch you at it, they’ll blacklist your site, which means that they’ll kick it out of their results listing. And it will be really difficult to get back in! So make sure our site isn’t using any invisible text and that all the text on the site is visible to humans and the search engines.

They hate doors and mirrors.

Have you ever searched for something online and clicked on what you thought was the perfect match, only to come to what was little more than a full-page advertisement or a bunch of links? Disappointing, isn’t it? And then there’s a link at the bottom of the page pointing to the site you originally thought you were originally going to? By this point, you already have a sour taste in your mouth.

Or you’re looking for a piece of information and you click a couple of links that look like exactly the same site with slightly different words. You get a sense of deja vu and start to feel a bit like you’re losing your mind, right?

This tactic is called doorway and mirror sites. The search engines feel exactly the same way that you do about them because, again, the search engines want searchers to be happy with the results they get from their queries, not disgruntled or confused.

When you start your relationship with the search engines, make sure that your site optimization strategy focuses on ethical ways of getting their attention like being content-rich, having links with other high-quality sites (not link farms!), and updating your site on a regular basis. Those tactics will ensure that you start a love affair with the search engines instead of just heading for a bad breakup.

Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big visibility for small businesses. As the owner of elf design, Erin is passionate about helping her clients stand out in front of their competition and attract more clients. One of the best ways to do that is with Search Engine Optimization, which you can learn about in her eLearning product, Raise Your Ranking, which is available at http://www.howtoraiseyourranking.com.