SEO Blog

Fluctuations in search engine rankings are certainly nothing new. It takes a highly established site to consistently rank for the same terms over a prolonged period. For most though, the occasional rise and fall are to be expected.

However, when you introduce a new page, site or update, rankings are often anything but static. They will often start low, then maybe jump up dramatically, before finally settling at a reasonable level. This will be the point from which you begin to optimise.
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Unfortunately there are very few sites that can boldly claim to maintain any form of consistency within their rankings – particularly in the long-tail terms. So what can you do to limit these fluctuations and can they be avoided outright?

Well, the simple answer is that, no, you can’t ever be exempt from changes in rankings. This is simply because the search engines are in a constant state of flux. Even if your site hasn’t changed, there’s a good chance that your competitors’ pages or even the algorithm itself have been updated. Nothing stands still in SEO for long and nowhere is this felt more than in the world of rankings.
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This recent clampdown on content farms has thrown up a lot of debate within the SEO industry. Some see is as a death knell for article marketing, others believe that scrapers will find it increasingly difficult to rank; however, the overriding issue for me is that Google has clearly highlight the fallibility the Google algorithm and its reliance on links and content.

What do links really indicate these days? So many people are buying and selling them, that telling a natural link from an ‘illegally’ sourced one is increasingly difficult. JC Penney get the boot for having a few dodgy ones, whilst thousands of others carry on regardless. There’s a disparity that rightly irks many SEOs and site owners.
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Sometimes it can be difficult judging exactly when you need to update content on a site. Clearly it’s beneficial to have refreshed copy on a page as it provides the search engines with something new to index. However, you don’t want to inadvertently ruin your rankings for a search term. So what’s the solution?
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You’re probably tired about reading how evil paid links are by now. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they continue to work; however, criticisms against them rarely come with any explicit examples of the negative impact they can have.

Well, how about this one? Econsultancy yesterday highlighted the case of gourmetgiftbaskets.com, who offer exactly what their name suggests [see: The $4m Google penalty]. They were making huge profits and sitting comfortably in the top couple of places on Google for all of their primary terms. Unfortunately though one day all the rankings disappeared. No word of warning, no apparent reason why, the site just wasn’t visible any more.

The culprit? Paid links of course.
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In the old days you’d expect that the obvious answer to this was to continually submit your site to the search engines and you’d be away. Sadly not only was this not very time effective, it just wasn’t very effective full-stop.

Once Google got around to processing your request you were probably about ready to send another one. Now you can save yourself the bother.

Whilst you might still choose to submit your site at the outset, that is probably enough. There are far more effective way for you to get the attention of search engines today, the most effective being strong links and your Webmaster Tools Account. Let’s see how both work.
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Before starting out on this post, I would like to acknowledge that there are exceptions to this rule. Google’s algorithm isn’t perfect and sometimes bad sites do rank above those that offer value; not sure why but hey, it happens.

Anyway, if you want to rank higher for your selected keywords then you had better have a site that is better than your competitors. Search engines reward those sites that people enjoy using. They analyse content and visitor reaction (i.e. bounce rate, time on site etc.) and make informed decisions based on that data.

Of course you can attempt to manipulate that through excessive (blackhat?) SEO practices, like spamming comment boards, getting involved in link farms or exchanging cash for a few inbound gems, but ultimately you can’t blind Google to a bad site.
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Are negative reviews damaging your search engine traffic?  Unfortunately there’s no magic wand to simply usher away negative reviews or bad press. If Google thinks that another page is relevant to your name or search terms then unfortunately whatever it may be will remain there until something more relevant comes along.  Tough luck.

However, SEO can help you in this regard. As you know, SEO is all about optimising site’s for search engine rankings. More and more though, with the diversification of search elements (think news, images and social media feeds) there is greater scope to achieve decent visibility away from the organic results.
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If your an etailer, your business is to sell products. You can’t hope to do that on reputation or price alone, you need more. What you need is a site of mesmerising product descriptions.

These unique (more on which in a moment) overviews are your frontline marketing tool. They can sell both the click (on search engines) and then the product too. Without a product description that leaps off the page and interacts with your target audience, sales could suffer.

Strangely though, your product description isn’t simply there to sell to your audience. It has a second purpose too.
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Not meaning to initialise everything, but there is a great deal that small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) can gain from investing in SEO. If they have a website already, then it makes sense that optimisation is the next step.

Unfortunately there are plenty of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of SEO as a practise. This leads many to either ignore it or fail to realise that it even exists. The trouble is, whatever your own views are of SEO and however you view practitioners, the results speak for themselves.

A good search engine ranking is a golden ticket to targeted traffic. Search engines are the backbone of the Internet and most people’s automatic go-to for information. By ignoring SEO you could be surrendering this potential.
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