Updates and Maintenance

After a program is set up, the real fun has just begun. A successful program requires regular maintenance. If someone in your organization isn’t solely dedicated to managing your search engine marketing programs, someone should spend at least several hours per week maintaining the optimization program. Here are some of the main elements to maintaining an SEO program:

  • Keep Content Fresh -Keeping content fresh on your site almost always gives you a boost in the search engines. In an effort to keep their indexes current, search engines will favor pages that are updated frequently.
  • Updating for Search Engine algorithm changes - Search engines are constantly tweaking and changing their ranking algorithms to “improve” the quality of their listings. Updating pages has to become a routine done at least monthly to keep up. The person in charge of maintaining the search engine campaign should follow industry news/updates and continue to analyze competing sites and top placements. Here are some suggested publications, blogs and resources:
  • Building New Content - Generally, one page can only be optimized well for 1-3 phrases. The more pages produced, the more keywords that can be covered, increasing organic search engine results, traffic and conversions.
  • Re-submissions - Resubmissions generally aren’t necessary for the major search engines and directories. However, they may be necessary if your site falls completely or nearly completely out of the listings. If your site has fallen out of a search engine or has lost all of its good rankings, though, it’s a good idea to rework each page and try to determine what the problem is before re-submitting to an engine.
  • Reporting and Tracking - The reporting tool of Web Position Gold is extremely useful for monitoring your listings as well as your competition’s. I feel that it is important to note that one should try to avoid getting ““bogged down in the details”” of tracking though. Meaning, search engine listings are extremely dynamic and can swing back and forth very widely. It is important to monitor and report so that you can measure your efforts, but I try to analyze results by looking at overall exposure - how many top-ten listings, total listings, etc. as opposed to focusing too narrowly on the fluctuation of individual listings. Most importantly, watch conversions.If you run your report a least one a week you’ll see shifts in your rankings pretty quickly and can make adjustments to your pages as necessary.

Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips