SEO is all about getting your site well ranked in the search engines for keywords that you are targeting. What do you do when you start to see your web site starting to fall down the rankings rather than continuing the climb?

This is a common problem. Despite all your hard work, others around the internet are also working hard to get their pages to rank as high as possible. Eventually, their SEO work will pay off and they will bump you and many others down the list.

When this happens to your pages, you have several options available to you. Before doing anything though, visit the sites that have knocked you off your perch and try to determine what SEO strategies they have used to get to that position. Without that information, you have little chance of getting your position back - it will be like trying to box - blindfolded.

With the information you have gathered from the sites that have demoted you, you can:

• Decide whether or not to continue SEO strategies on that page or whether or not to trash that page (not really trash, keep the page) and create a new page
• Determine what SEO strategies need updating and more work, for example, could you find more sites that could link into your pages
• Determine whether or not the keywords are still relevant.
• Shrug your sholders and so - oh well - that’s life

You could also look at whether or not your site is achieving its goals. Sometimes we place to much emphasis on search engine rankings and not enough on our goals. I was recently asked to look at SEO strategies for a site that was not ranking highly in the search results. The site was very profitable and most of its visitors and revenue came, not from search results, but from referrals and e-mail marketing campaigns.

While an SEO program could bring new customers to the site, the reality was that he had a high 80+% conversion rate. His customers came ready to spend. eCommerce sites can be hard to optimize. He was making very good money, in fact struggling to keep up with demand. So why did he want to rank well in the search engines? He heard that he should!

For most sites, search results are important. If search results are important for your site, then you need to determine why you are slipping down the rankings. What are others doing that you are not? What areas can you improve on? SEO work can be frustrating in this regard.

However, there is one point that I think should be made. SEO strategies are not set and forget with the occasional fire spotting. SEO is an activity that needs constant attention, frequent tweaking, and a constant eye on what your competition is doing. You can bet they are doing the same to you.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 11:27 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.