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Search Engine
Positioning is the process of boosting and maintaining your website’s
position in the results that Internet users see when they run queries on
different search engines.
There are
two distinct steps needed to maximize the effectiveness of your position
in a search engine listing. The
first is to make key modifications to your pages in order to gain top
positioning within a search engine’s index.
The second is something that is commonly ignored.
That position needs to be maintained.
Too often, a great position on a search engine only slips away,
taking business away with it.
As you
probably know by now, merely being listed in a search index is not
enough to bring new visitors to your website.
Your website must rank at or near the top of the search results
in order to collect all the traffic that search engines can produce.
The first major step in positioning your site is choosing
descriptive and focused keywords. The
importance of excellent keywords cannot be emphasized enough.
Once your
website is submitted, it can take anywhere from several seconds to
several months for the indices to pick up your listing, depending on the
individual search engine.
If
you have chosen good keywords, you should have a good position near the
top of the listings. Now
the trick is to maintain that position.
Just because you appear at the top of the search engine results
doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed to remain there.
New websites appear by the second and search engines regularly
change the methods they use to index them.
To ensure that you maintain your position, you should have your
website re-submitted around once a month and have your ranking on each
major search engine checked regularly, preferably once a week. By
checking your ranking you can determine what your position is and
whether it is trending upward or downward.
If your position is heading up, great, you can stop holding your
breath. If your rank is
spiraling downwards, or you can’t seem to push ahead of certain
competitors, it time for some advanced work.
A
side-by-side comparison needs to be done to see exactly what your
competitor has that you don’t have, or what you have that your
competitor doesn’t. Maybe
that extra keyword or those extra hyperlinks are nosing them ahead of
you.
Search
engine submission and rank checking is a constant process that you must
maintain. Don’t let your
competitors get a leg up on you by ignoring ranking trends for too long.
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