Ranking Well in Google? Don’t Sit Back and Relax!

I’ve talked before about “not sitting back and relaxing” once you had a website built. One step further is “Don’t sit back and relax now that you are ranking in the search engines.” If you have invested time and money in getting your website to rank and attract more visitors, the last thing you should do is sit back and think you’ve made it.

Getting your website to rank well is an uphill battle. Creating attractive, compelling webpages is a must if you want your visitors to stay on your website. But getting them to visit your website is the first battle.

If you employ a search engine optimisation specialist, then they will analyse your website and most likely recommend changes to it. They might find:

· Duplication issues i.e. your content is not unique. For example, an ecommerce site may have products which can be found in different categories and therefore there may be many URLs for the same product.

· Poor choices of keywords. Perhaps, you’re not signalling to the search engines what your website is about.

· Navigation issues. Perhaps visitors find it hard to find information. The navigation is not easy. If it isn’t easy for visitors, then it won’t be easy for Google. This can lead to indexing issues — which means that Google doesn’t know about you.

· Lack of links internally and externally. Links are very important. They enable search engines to crawl from one web page to another. External links to your website provide search engines with a way of deciding how important your website is.

The Slog

Fixing these issues takes time and energy. Recently Rank Fishkin from MOZ.com described the SEO “slog”. Basically, there is a period of time when there is a lot of effort put in but not a lot of return in terms of a rise in rankings. This can lead to a “gap of disappointment”. This is so true as you (the client) have invested great hopes and money in getting your website to rank and nothing looks to be changing.

Once things start to improve ( and they will as long as you have professional SEO consultants who know what they’re doing and are not following old dangerous practices), you should not relax and believe you’ve made it. Rankings fluctuate as your competitors are not standing still. Next month it might be them in front. So SEO is an ongoing process and requires long term thinking. It is not a one-off.

As Google announces new updates whether it is Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird or whatever comes next, a website which doesn’t respond to these changes will start to plummet. This would be a waste of the time and money already invested.

Originally published at www.albaseoservices.co.uk.