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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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As the search engines continue to improve, your SEO needs to as well. A ranking tumble for your website can be devastating. You need to recover as soon as possible – it’s not the easiest task in the world, but it’s not as hard as you’d think. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you cannot panic. You have to keep working on your SEO projects and you need to remember that listings and rankings come and go spiratically at times but that search engines won’t let you down if your site is useful.

The experts’ advice to websites that have lost their ranking is usually to start over, following current and good SEO information. Look over your entire site and insure that you haven’t done something that would have caused this sudden change in listings and rankings. Normally if you haven’t done anything wrong, your links will slowly begin to reappear again especially if you have a nice sized linking network that is listed well.

One step that you can take is to narrow your site’s focus and work hard on one or two keywords. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s sufficient. Make sure each page of your site includes good enough navigation that someone can get anywhere from anywhere else, and make sure you do this with plain ‘a href’ links, not fancy JavaScript.

If you are using frames, now is a good time to dump them. You can replace them with scrollable

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Before you can evaluate your site’s SEO profile, you need to understand what an SEO profile is and how it works. An SEO profile for a website is just like a marketing plan or a business plan – basically, it’s a strategy document, putting your decisions into words. This is best performed on a computer program such as Microsoft Word as these programs do provide the best bang for your buck. All else aside, Microsoft does put out some excellent business oriented software so take advantage of it!

Writing your SEO profile should consist of the following:

An introduction – This should include a BRIEF description of your company as well as a purpose statement of some kind. If you can describe your company in a neat, tight format, you will be one step ahead of most in the SEO game.

Goals relating to your Search Engine Status – What do you want your page rank to be? Where do you want to be listed under specif key words? top 50? 25? 10? How many pages of your site do you want search engines to index? Do you want to pay for listings? These questions will get you started, but you must go more in-depth into your SEO goals. Also include the search engines and directories that you feel are necessities such as Google, DMOZ, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Information regarding SEO actions and achievements – This one is pretty self-explanatory. List everything that you do regarding Search Engine Optimization as well as any successes caused by these actions.

Once you’ve written an SEO profile, you can compare it from time-to-time with what’s going on with your site, before either adjusting the site to reflect your strategy or adjusting the profile to reflect a strategy change. Generally, it is wise to stick to the plan, but occasions may arise when you find that this is simply not logical anymore. In these cases, you must re-evaluate your entire plan because one change can effect the rest of your strategy. If you have an extremely intricate strategy that depends on one thing going well, you may want to diversify your strategy. Your profile should especially focus on special things you plan to do that aren’t standard SEO practice. Standard SEO work can get you only so far. Every one of your competitors is probably doing the same things so get creative. This is one place where doing something for yourself can really push you to the top. If you already have a high-ranking site, you should use your profile to document the reasons why it has happened, to help you maintain your high ranking.

Keeping your SEO profile updated will allow you to stay current not only on what’s going on with your website, but also on what’s going on in the SEO industry. The SEO industry is very fickle. It can change suddenly without warning to reflect what a search engine or directory believes to be the opinion or benefit of the market. Remember that search engines are always in competition with one another to deliver the most results of the highest quality. If you stay on top of your quality, changes in the SEO industry will have minimal effect on you. It is still important to track these changes in order to ensure that your site gets maximum exposure. Evaluating your website and profile regularly give you an advantage in the market – you should never let a profile get older than 3 months, and you should refer to it and update it every time you make major changes to your site. These changes include additions of services or removal of services as well as design changes and SEO work.

There is software available online that can help you evaluate your site’s SEO profile. Some of these software are very useful, others are very overrated. The difference that these programs will make in your fight for page rank and listings depends on your interpretation of the results nearly as much as it depends on the value of the software itself. In order to find some software simply google for SEO software. Reading the reviews and making judgement calls is the best way to determine the worth of SEO software. If you think that its worth going for look at the cost of it. If the cost seems to high, it probably is. You can generally evaluate your SEO profile on your own once you have learned what to look for in an Search Engine Optomized page.

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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As the demand for search engine marketing continues to grow, so does the demand for experts in the area. In recent months, mass emails seem to be the new ‘promise’ of top search engine rankings. How do you choose an SEO provider that will understand the needs of your website and provide quality service?

Let’s breakdown the elements of SEO, to make it easier for you to recognize a good product. To find a good SEO provider, look for these things:

They need to be able to check your current site, evaluate it and set goals for it. They should develop a list of target keywords relevant to the site, write and insert good meta tags for you, and check all other tags to make sure that they’re alright. They should also check all your content and make recommendations on how to improve it to get better search engine rankings.

They should provide link-building programs, including writing and submitting listings to directories and giving you ideas on who to ask for links from. Reports tracking search engine referrals to your site are always good, especially if they explain what they mean and how they can be improved.

Website maintenance is a very important aspect of any SEO program. Once their site has been optimized, many people don’t realize that they need to keep up these methods over time. If you let your site lapse back to the way it was as you add new content, then you’ll need to start all over again.

What kind of price can you put on all this? Well, pricing structures for SEO vary a lot between companies. Some companies will charge more because they include a monthly maintenance fee, while other companies offer customized proposals based on a websites specific need. In general, good SEO can cost as much as $150 an hour, so be prepared for that. Keep in mind that the larger your site is, the more work will be involved. It will naturally take less time to optimize a smaller, simpler site, so keep this in mind when you consider the pricing.

After you’re more comfortable with what the services offered are and how they’re priced, you’ll want to make sure that the company you’re choosing as your SEO provider has the knowledge and skill to complete the work for you. You should talk to three or four companies before you choose one. Be sure to ask them these questions, and back off if you don’t feel like you’re getting an honest answer:

1. How long has your company been in business? Can you explain what your previous experience is and what principles your SEO works under?
2. What other services do you provide besides SEO? Do you provide Internet marketing services?
3. What kinds of industries have you serviced previously? Can you provide me with checkable references?
4. How will you break down the cost of your services?
5. How much will I need to do myself for this SEO project to run smoothly?
6. How much time do I need to set aside to communicate with you during the process?
7. How long does it usually take to achieve results? (SEO is a gradual process, so a reply of anything under 6 months should be a red flag for you).
8. Is it possible to have someone from your firm teach us how to maintain your SEO once it’s done? (If they tell you that you wouldn’t be able to do it yourself, then that’s another red flag).

When they do send you a proposal on the project, you will want to make sure that it contains everything you spoke about, and everything else that should be there. If the answers to any of these questions are missing, you should walk away:

1. What specific services are included in the contract? Are any omitted? Make sure that what you discussed and wanted is included.
2. What is the name or position of the person you will be working with? Are you dealing with a salesperson, a designer, or someone else?
3. Are allowances made for communication with you? Are there any additional fees for contact?
4. How will the company be providing support? By email? On the phone? Do they stop supporting you after a month or so?
5. Are there extra fees for re-optimization or additional consulting? Is it really necessary? What maintenance is provided? If not, what is the additional cost of it? When maintenance is not included with the plan you need to be careful, as there are people who will charge you exorbitant amounts of money to maintain their optimization.
6. What reports are provided and how often will they provide them?
7. What are the total charges? Are there any additional charges?

By taking steps like this you will guard yourself against bad practices, you will also have a better understanding of the service you are getting, and you can easily compare offers to find the best one. But how can you tell if your provider is operating ethically? Well, that’s is pretty easy. Here’s a list of the sales pitches that bad SEO providers will use on you. If you hear any of these from a company, use someone else instead.

1. Guaranteeing top-ranking placements. This is impossible to do since the algorithms of the search engines change often, and any good SEO provider will tell you that.
2. Offering a service that includes the development of ‘doorway pages’. These designs often don’t take your visitors ease of use into consideration, and search engines will ban your site if they catch you using them.
3. Telling you that you need more than one domain name pointing to your website. You can get banned for domain spamming, so don’t take the risk.
4. Any company that says it will get thousands of inbound links to your website – they will be using free-for-alls, which are very bad for your rankings.
5. Companies that offer you search engine submission software. Good positions always come from hand submission. If they tell you that submission by hand is not the best way to go, don’t stick around.

Many SEO providers use unethical ‘spam’ practices because they are cheap, easy to implement, and do provide very short-term results. Beware of any provider that uses them.

The best way to tell if the provider’s SEO practices are ethical is to ask: “Do these changes benefit visitors to my site as well making it more search engine friendly?” A good SEO provider will always say ‘yes’, as SEO is as much about the users as it is about the engines. After all, what’s the point of a high ranking page if it’s nothing but unusable rubbish that will have people rushing for the ‘Back’ button?

Don’t be overwhelmed by these things, but always be on the look out to make sure that you’re getting the best service possible. Good SEO companies can boost your site’s traffic without resorting to unethical practices, and keep up with changes in the industry.

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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