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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 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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