Surviving the Search Engines
Are you suffering from GAS? Google anxiety syndrome, also known as GAS, affects approximately 8 out of 10 businesses. If your company depends on your website for online sales and traffic GAS probably affects you. Businesses will often stress about their positioning and search engine traffic. With website traffic and search engine rankings fluctuating, how can you survive the search engines?
Surviving is the easiest part of search engine marketing and optimization. Once you have optimized your website you will notice its rankings will often bounce around. This is normal in most cases, and should not keep you awake at night. Remember, search engines are constantly updating their indexes. Sometimes they have glitches that can cause your site to disappear, rank lower, or even bounce around.
To prevent the “Google dance” and other side affects of GAS, go back to the basics. Keep track of your incoming links at all times. Check to see if your incoming links have changed, or if someone new has linked to you. If your linking campaign is unstable, your ranking can suffer. Continue to add new incoming links on an ongoing basis to strengthen your positions.
Watch your competitors! Make sure that other companies are not optimizing their websites better, getting more incoming links, or adding more web pages. A good way to get dethroned from the top of the search engines is by the actions of your competition. If they hire an SEO company to help them, hire a better SEO company for yourself!
Keep up to date!
Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, as well as the way they index and rank pages. If you keep up to date, you can stay ahead of your competition. Do what is effective now, not 3 months ago. Some companies still think all they need is some good meta tags. Meta tags may have worked 4 years ago, but strategies like that will not do you any good now!
Keeping up to date also means implementing the newest techniques to keep your website on top. Optimize your site to have good content, acceptable keyword saturation, and a strong call to action. Remember your website is for your customers, and should not be designed only for search engines to pick it up. Your website should cater to your customers first, and then to the search engines. Getting ranked at the top doesn’t benefit your company if no one buys your products or services.
Search engine marketing and optimization involves a lot of work and research. As long as you use good practices your site will enjoy good rankings. Most websites will jump around on the ranking results every once and a while. The key to avoid too much GAS is to accept minor ups and downs and continue to build good content and a valuable website for your visitors.
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