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Long-term SEO maintenance requires dedication to your website. There are people who think that they can throw up a web page and that people will find them, and good luck too them – but it won’t happen. Any website that wants to make money needs to get optimized, and stay that way. Running and SEO campaign once or twice isn’t enough in this market: you need to consider long-term maintenance of your SEO.

For long term SEO maintenance to be effective, you need to constantly monitor the search engines algorithms, which can change very frequently. You also need to keep track of your competitors’ optimizations and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Always consider your website as an investment – you’ve put time, money and effort into it. Your investment needs to be protected, and the way to do that is SEO maintenance. This makes sure that your website is ranked high enough to bring you the traffic you need, and keeps the sales coming.

We’ve compiled a list of tips to help you with your SEO maintenance. To keep good rankings, you need to pay attention to how your site is doing. A few things to remember are:

1. Check on your pages regularly and make sure they’re still listed. Your listings are the most important part of your SEO work. Whether the page is listed or not is vastly more important than what key words you have etc. After all, if you aren’t listed at all what good is it to optimize?
2. Monitor the listings every week or two to make sure your pages are displaying correctly and that there are no problems with your site. While your at it see whether you’ve risen, dropped, or remained constant as far as listings go. Odds are that you will not remain constant, if you do remain constant you should consider this a small success as you have probably risen above other pages that were formerly above you while others from below you have surpassed you.
3. Watch for trouble, and fix it quickly. Don’t think it will correct itself – it won’t. Any missing pages should be checked out thoroughly. Chances are that the system has run into a problem, but if you don’t check it out you may very easily be wrong. Always correct any of your mistakes as your mistakes can be very costly if they are not dealt with in a timely fashion.
4. Resubmit your site if you make major changes, but not for anything smaller. The most important time to resubmit your site is if you have recently changed your titles. Titles are very important in SEO and can deliver you with a completely new set of quality key words.
5. Create monthly ranking reports on your site, to see if any changes need to be made.
6. Keep building your link popularity.
7. Keep submitting your site to the big directories, as spiders use these as a starting point.
8. Watch your competitors and the methods they use. If they start trying to cheat, report them straightaway – it gets them out of your way.
9. Set goals for yourself. Write out an SEO maintenance plan, and if things change then make sure to set new goals and stick with them.
10. Stay up to date on the latest SEO information.
11. Check your site’s performance – if you’re not monitoring your traffic, find a tool to do it now.
12. Maintain a solid plan for dealing with your site’s growth. Don’t panic if you see a blip.

This might seem like a lot of work for a small website or company, but you need to do it to help your website grow. If you don’t have growth, you have nothing. No business wants to stay where it is forever, and SEO is a good way to get more business and stay in the race.

Do you remember why you started a website to begin with? The chances are you wanted to make money. Your website is a business, and you need to run it like one. Don’t stress too much over the work involved: it’s only a few hours each week in total, and you can do it whenever you want.

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

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Google has implemented a cutting edge method of crawling web site for its search engine index. This unprecedented method of indexing web pages is known as Google Sitemaps, and it is quickly growing in popularity among webmasters and SEO agents and managers due to its ability to get entire web site indexed quickly and to pick up errors in the links coming into and out of these web site.

Google Sitemaps consists of placing the URLs of your pages along with important information regarding how Google should index them into an XML document. This information is then read by the Google Spider and the pages are normally indexed quite quickly assuming that they are coherent to Google’s standards for indexing pages (and also assuming that the sitemaps conform to Googles Sitemap Criteria which will be explained a little later).

There are two primary types of Google Sitemaps. The first is a list of pages in a website and the second is a list of sitemaps in the website. Google has limited the number of URLs in its sitemaps to fifty thousand URLs. This may sound like a lot, but for some of the more intricate web site, fifty thousand URLs may not even make a dent in what they want indexed.

This led to the advent of the Google Sitemap index file which can index up to one thousand sitemaps. If you do the math, this means that you could have one thousand sitemaps with up to fifty thousand URLs in each sitemap which allows for fifty million URLs to be placed in your Google Sitemap scheme. But wait, there’s more. Who ever said that you can’t have an index of indexes? You could actually make an index of a thousand index files which are all indexes of a thousand index files. Basically, there is no limit to the number of URLs that you can hold in your Google sitemaps.

Now that you understand the power of the Google Sitemap you’re probably asking yourself how to create and implement a Google Sitemap. The first step is to simply create your sitemaps. Here are the templates which are also available at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

For a sitemap file use the following format:

http://www.example.com/

2005-01-01
monthly

0.8

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii

weekly

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand

2004-12-23
weekly

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundland

2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00

0.3

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa

2004-11-23
Everything here is pretty self-explanatory with the exception of the changefreq and the priority aspects. The changefreq asks how often you think the page will change on average. The possible values for the changefreq option are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. The priority aspect basically just asks how important the particular page is in your website. The value can be anywhere between 0.0 and 1.0. If you decide not to specify a priority it will default to 0.5.

To create a sitemap index file follow the following format:

http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz

2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00

http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz

2005-01-01

This is all pretty straight forward but it leads me to my next point. You notice that the file names all end in .gz. Google allows you to compress your sitemaps so that they take up less of your disk space when you place them on your site and less of your band width when Google downloads them (which it seems to do approximately once every 9 hours or so). You may only use .gz compression. If you try .zip, it won’t work.

Now all that you really have to do is submit your sitemap to google. In order to do this you must go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and log into your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you can create one. Once you log in you will be allowed to submit your sitemap into the google index. At some point within about 24 hours of your submission, Google will give you the option to place a small HTML file onto your website so that it can confirm that you do, indeed, have access to editing the site. Once you have done this it will begin to provide you with statistics regarding your google sitemap. (Note that even without this feature you can see when google downloaded the sitemap last and what the status of the sitemap was at that time.)

How Google Sitemaps Fits Into Search Engine Optimization.

According to Google, the Sitemaps utility is free and will continue to be – yet it’s almost as good as the paid inclusion service offered by rival search engines. So how can you take advantage of this great service?

First of all, you should create a Google Account. Although you can still use Google Sitemaps without an account, you need one before you can use Google’s tools to check your site submissions. Once you do that and go to sitemaps.google.com, you’ll be guided through the process.

Google Sitemaps has a very helpful question and answer page that will give you the help you need – the answers to most questions people have can be found right there. Good luck!

About the Author

Luie De Von is a marketing consultant with Easypostcard Marketing and has been providing consumers and business owners with marketing strategies. For years he has helped businesses to have more and growing clients through Advertising Postcards , Marketing Postcard , Business Post Card.

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