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| Smart Web Center - Basic Search Engine Tutorial |
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Monitoring Your Search Engine Positions
Since the large majority of people go to search engines to look for information, you want to work towards obtaining the best position you can get in the search engine results Most people who use search engines will not look past the first two or three pages of search engine results, so your objective is to get your site into those pages. Unless you have a really unusual set of keywords or keyword phrases, getting on the first three pages is not something that is going to happen overnight. If your keywords are in a highly competitive field, it may never happen. But it is what you work towards as your site builds up its popularity and content. Once you get your website into the first three pages on a particular keyword or phrase, you may think you are all set. In reality, this is just the first stage of the work that you will need to do. The second stage is monitoring your position to ensure that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve. You can think of your search engine position as a stock portfolio. You'd keep an eye on your stock portfolio so you could sell at the right time and make a profit. The same is true of search engine positions. The profit is in terms of visitors to your website. When you first start your search engine campaign and have taken all the right steps to increase your ranking, you will probably see a fairly consistent upward trend. When your position levels out, you have reached stage two. In stage two, you will see short term fluctuations in your position. This is like the short term rise and fall of a stock portfolio and is not a concern. What is a concern is sudden drops in position or a long term downward trend. You need to set up a system to monitor your rankings on a monthly basis. Charts work well to keep track of the positions of the web page positions you are monitoring. One of the things you have to monitor is your competition. Your competitor's web page position may rise, gradually or suddenly, which lowers your own position. If their position drops, yours rises. You can expect changes like these every month. Monitoring these changes gives you vital information you can use to adjust your search engine ranking strategy. You also need to monitor changes that the search engines make to their positioning formulas. Each search engine has its own formula for determining serach engine results. Some of them use a number of formulas and rotate them to deter search engine spammers. They all change their formulas over time. These changes can be gradual or sudden and can happen without warning. When you have a good monitoring strategy you can analyze the changes and take steps to remedy any loss of positon before it becomes a serious problem. You also need to monitor the number of visitors that come from the various search engines you are tracking. A drop or gain in number of visitors from a particular search engine might not have anything to do with your position. It may be due to a change in the relative popularity of the search engine. A good resource for checking the popularity ratings of search engines is: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html A sudden drop in position in all the search engines you are tracking is a big red flag. Several things could have happened to cause this. If you have made changes to your website, they may have caused problems for the search engine crawlers. Check to make sure that the crawlers are not having trouble with the changes. If a web crawler came through when your site was down for maintenance, your site might actually disappear entirely from that search engine, at least until the next time that web crawler visits your website. A drop in position in one search engine can affect your position in others. This is because many search engines rely on other search engines for their information. The relationships between search engines changes over time. To see current search engine relationships, you can visit this website, which maintains a current chart: http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm Search engine positioning is a major investment and a key element in your online marketing campaign. Monitor your positions regularly, and takes steps early to remedy any problems that come up to ensure that you get the most from your investment. |