ongoing search engine maintenance

Now that your web site is optimized for the search engines, you're done. Right?

Let's try a couple of analogies before we answer that. Would you buy a new car and fill the gas tank once, and expect it to putt along for the rest of its life? Would you paint your living room today and expect it to stay a brilliant white forever? The answer is of course not! Anyone who tells you that you can optimize your site once and then sit back and wait for a number one position is simply not being honest (and they've probably never painted a living room either).

Search engines change by the day - by the minute, even. Try a keyword search now and then try it an hour from now. You might be surprised to find that the search results may have shifted, perhaps not so dramatically, or perhaps so.

There are a couple of simple reasons for the frequent shift in search results. Search engines may change their ranking methods, and sites that were "optimized" yesterday are spam, or simply forgettable today. Plus search engines are constantly adding new sites and new pages, which makes that much more competition for yours. Or maybe your competitor decided to try his hand at optimization and his incredible title tag boosted him into a top position. Right above your site.

Optimization is not a hard science or a one-time fix for lagging site traffic. Rather, it's an ongoing process of analysis followed by adjustments to your site in order to study the marketing strategies that have worked, and those that haven't.

Search engine maintenance options

In order to gain and keep exposure for your site, we can offer a variety of ongoing maintenance options including:

• Article writing or blog writing to keep your site updated regularly
• Continued directory research and submissions
• Title and META tag analysis and updating
• HTML/XHTML code "tweaking"
• Web site statistics analysis and consulting
• Continued keyword research and keyword usage testing
• Link building strategies
• Paid program research and account management
• Rank checks and reports

It may be a cliché, but content really is king. And search engines are the serfs running to do its bidding.

It's worth repeating here if you haven't read through any of our other search engine marketing materials. Search engines love a fresh site. You can change title and keyword tags 'til kingdom come (no pun intended) and watch as your site disappears from the search results if you don't add fresh, relevant content on a regular basis. It's not easy - it requires time, research, sometimes even a professional copywriter, but if you're serious about web marketing, content is crucial.

Every page of your web site gives you the opportunity to target another keyword or reach another customer. Why wouldn't you want to add dozens and dozens of extra-rich pages to your site?

And here's an added bonus to having terrific content: other site owners may think it's pretty great, too, and link from their web site to yours. Those precious links can give a significant boost to your rankings, and you didn't even have to try.

As part of your ongoing search engine maintenance program, we can keep your site "fresh" on a monthly, weekly, even daily basis (especially if you have a blog).

The most popular kid on the block

You thought you'd escaped popularity contests when you graduated high school, but the search engines have brought back the popularity wars full blast. Search engines like "popular" sites, and they way they judge popularity is by counting the number of links that point to your site from other quality, relevant sites.

This bears repeating: the links must be from quality, relevant sites. Gone are the days when you could exchange links with a hundred other desperate web site owners who'd link to cow-milking instructions from their high end eCommerce sites if only it meant a good spot in Google. Search engines are smarter these days, and they see through the façades right into the heart of your content. If you link to irrelevant junk-sites, or sites that are employing spamming techniques to gain (brief) high rankings, then your site may be ignored, or worse, banned from search results.

We can help you search out high-quality linking opportunities and even set up reciprocal links on your site (you link to mine and I'll link to yours.)

How we track your progress

Ultimately what we want for your site is to turn casual visitors into loyal customers. First, we start by increasing traffic to your site (through any of our optimization or advertising strategies). We'll use your web site statistics to determine how many visitors are being drawn to your site on any given day, how many of those visitors are new and how many are returning for another look. We'll look at your top "entry pages", which are the pages that visitors are coming into your site from. It might not necessarily be your home page, especially if the visitor found your site in the search engines. We'll also look at your top "exit pages". Are people coming to your home page only to leave within a few seconds, and never really looking around? Do you have a high occurrence of cart abandonment? How your visitors are coming, and more importantly how they're going, can provide valuable marketing information. We can use this information to make changes to your site that will keep more visitors coming than going.

Traffic is nice, but customers are better. We can monitor your web site sales, service requests, e-mail newsletter signups or contact form submissions to evaluate how well your site is reaching - and holding onto - your target audience.

We can also provide you with a monthly rank check and report for your most important keywords and phrases.

The Bottom Line: Because the options are daunting and it all sounds expensive

The best way to approach your ongoing maintenance program is to determine your marketing goals and set a budget. If you'd like us to explore multiple options and opportunities, a simple monthly retainer may work for you, since it will give us the flexibility to try different strategies at different times, giving you a well-rounded search marketing program. Or, we can stick to one strategy if that works best for your business.

For more information about our ongoing search engine maintenance programs and to find out which will fit your business needs and budget, Contact Us, or for new customers or existing customers with a new project, take advantage of a free initial consultation and no-obligation project planning for web site search engine maintenance.