SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
Effective Long Term SEO Maintenance
Long-term SEO maintenance requires dedication
to your website. There are people who think that they can
throw up a web page and that people will find them, and good
luck too them – but it won’t happen. Any website that wants
to make money needs to get optimized, and stay that way.
Running and SEO campaign once or twice isn’t enough in this
market: you need to consider long-term maintenance of your
SEO.
For
long term SEO maintenance to be effective, you need to
constantly monitor the search engines algorithms, which
can change very frequently. You also need to keep track of
your competitors’ optimizations and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Always consider your website as an investment – you’ve put
time, money and effort into it. Your investment needs to
be protected, and the way to do that is SEO maintenance.
This makes sure that your website is ranked high enough to
bring you the traffic you need, and keeps the sales coming.
We’ve
compiled a list of tips to help you with your SEO maintenance. To keep good rankings, you need to pay attention
to how your site is doing. A few things to remember are:
1. Check on your pages regularly and make sure they’re still
listed. Your listings are the most important part of your
SEO work. Whether the page is listed or not is vastly more
important than what key words you have etc. After all, if
you aren’t listed at all what good is it to optimize?
2. Monitor the listings every week or two to make sure your
pages are displaying correctly and that there are no problems
with your site. While your at it see whether you’ve risen,
dropped, or remained constant as far as listings go. Odds
are that you will not remain constant, if you do remain constant
you should consider this a small success as you have probably
risen above other pages that were formerly above you while
others from below you have surpassed you.
3. Watch for trouble, and fix it quickly. Don’t think it
will correct itself – it won't. Any missing pages should
be checked out thoroughly. Chances are that the system has
run into a problem, but if you don’t check it out you may
very easily be wrong. Always correct any of your mistakes
as your mistakes can be very costly if they are not dealt
with in a timely fashion.
4. Resubmit your site if you make major changes, but not
for anything smaller. The most important time to resubmit
your site is if you have recently changed your titles. Titles
are very important in SEO and can deliver you with a completely
new set of quality key words.
5. Create monthly ranking reports on your site, to see if
any changes need to be made.
6. Keep building your link popularity.
7. Keep submitting your site to the big directories, as
spiders use these as a starting point.
8. Watch your competitors and the methods they use. If they
start trying to cheat, report them straightaway – it gets
them out of your way.
9. Set goals for yourself. Write out an SEO maintenance
plan, and if things change then make sure to set new goals
and stick with them.
10. Stay up to date on the latest SEO information.
11. Check your site’s performance – if you’re not monitoring
your traffic, find a tool to do it now.
12. Maintain a solid plan for dealing with your site’s growth.
Don’t panic if you see a blip.
This might seem like a lot of work for a small website or
company, but you need to do it to help your website grow.
If you don’t have growth, you have nothing. No business wants
to stay where it is forever, and SEO is a good way to get
more business and stay in the race.
Do you remember why you started a website to begin with?
The chances are you wanted to make money. Your website is
a business, and you need to run it like one. Don’t stress
too much over the work involved: it’s only a few hours each
week in total, and you can do it whenever you want.
