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formula doesn't become overused or outdated.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.
Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant
and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been
marketing online since the early days and he knows what it takes
to make money and succeed online. Stop by his Web site and
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