In the time that you allot for ongoing SEO efforts, there are plenty of things to do. But it should all
start with some form of position monitoring and web-site analytics. Position monitoring can usually
be accomplished by a software application. But be careful, Google specifically calls the use of automated
rank checkers a violation of its terms of service, and may disable your ability to connect to
and do searches on Google.com. Moderate use of such software probably won’t be a problem. Many
people use these tools to track their positions. So if you can’t take time out of your schedule every
day to look up the rank of your web site by keyword in every search engine you’re targeting, an
application to handle it could provide the position information you need.
Monitoring your web analytics is also an important part of your ongoing SEO, because this is where
you’ll find information about where your site visitors are coming from, how long they’re staying on
your site, and what pages they visit while they’re there. An analytics program should also tell you
how many people bounce — come to your site and leave immediately. A bounce is an indication that
your site is not optimized properly. Visitors who bounce from your site are not finding what they
thought they would find, based on the search engine results they clicked through.
You may also want to monitor other portions of your SEO strategy. For example, monitoring keywords
and links is always a good idea. Keywords can change. The popular term for something in
your industry could be one thing today and something completely different tomorrow. You have to
stay on top of trends in order to take advantage of them.
Monitoring your links is a matter of making sure they lead exactly where you expect them to lead.
You may also want to keep an eye on where links are coming to your site from. Incoming links could
be damaging to you if they’re coming from unrelated web sites, or if the sites they’re coming from
have been determined by search engines to be “bad neighborhoods.” A bad neighborhood is an
unethical site or group of sites.
As with monitoring your search rankings, monitoring links and keywords is also a task that lends itself
to automation. A good software application can keep track of these elements of your SEO plan and let
you know when you need to pay attention and improve your SEO efforts in one area or another.
In addition to monitoring your links, you’ll also want to add to links, and to content, over time. If
you add hundreds of links to your site overnight, search engine crawlers will likely not be impressed.
Instead, they’ll look at those links with suspicion and might even make the assumption that you’re
spamming the search engine. If that happens, you’ll be delisted from search rankings until you fix
what you’ve done wrong.
It’s far better to add links to your site a few at a time. You can add a few every day or every week,
depending on how many people want to link to your site. However, if you try to add all your links
on a single day, it’s not going to look good for you.
Content is also an element of SEO that needs to be maintained over time. Your content should change
regularly. In some cases, that means every day; in others it means once a week or once a month. Even
more important than the schedule with which you change your content is the content itself. Over
time you should be adding to your collection of relevant, useful content. If what you have on the site
isn’t relevant or useful, then replace it. And don’t put any piece of content on your site that doesn’t
give your visitors something useful.
In the same category as content is adding new pages to your web site. If you have an active site,
over time it should grow. And search engines will take note of the number of pages included in
your site each time you’re crawled. Landing pages, articles, blogs, newsletter archives, and site
maps are types of pages that will cause your site to grow, so if you’re maintaining your SEO, site
growth will be a natural extension of that.
If you’re adding new pages, you should also be adding internal page links. Link every page on your
web site. And use a comfortable linking structure. The main links for your site — to pages like your
home page, the contact page, or category overview pages — should appear both on the top or side
of your page in your main navigational structure, and they should be repeated at the bottom of
every page.
Also remember that if you are using PPC ads that lead to landing pages, the landing pages should
be added to your navigational structure as well. People don’t like to be dropped in the center of a
jungle and left to figure out how to get where they want to go. Instead, provide a clear path for the
next direction your visitors would like to take.
Finally, if you haven’t already done it, now is the time to rename pages and images that don’t include
keywords. Using the default titles created by your web-site design software won’t win you any points
with search engines. Instead, change those page names to reflect the keywords that you’ve chosen.
Ideally, the page name will be the same as the page title. And if possible, it will also contain relevant
keywords.
Your images may also need to be re-tagged. There are image-specific search engines that index your
images for display. So, if you run a custom stationery company, having pictures of your stationery
that are labeled with keyword-rich names may help you rank better in image searches as well as in
general searches. Keep your image alt tags updated, too.
If you change your relevant keywords, don’t forget to also replace meta tag keywords or update meta
descriptions as your page changes. It won’t do you any good at all to have one set of keywords in
your meta tags and another one used on the customer-facing portion of your web pages.
In short, the basic elements that helped you reach the top spot through your SEO efforts need to
be ongoing. Even the competitive research that you did back in the beginning needs to be updated
regularly. Your competition will change. If you don’t stay on top of those changes, you’ll find that
you fall behind the competition and will have to fight your way back to the top again.
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