SEO | SEM | Affiliate Expert | Andy Huang

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 <div> tags and have similar looking pages that search engines can index more easily. The most important concept in recovering from a ranking tumble is to perform damage control.

Any SEO operation that you have performed that could be deemed as controversial you should immediately disband. If you are lucky, your web site hasn’t been permanently deleted from any important search engines.

Once you have performed all of the local damage control that you can it is a good idea to insure that your file sizes are relatively small. Make sure that you don’t have any excessive images or large external files that will cause a search engine to give up on its attempt to index you. Make sure that you haven’t created a linking loop that Google’s bots can’t find a way out of.

Links are very important to your website’s rankings, and you need to consider finding good link partners to improve your targeted traffic and keyword relevancy. If you have a decent corp of link partners already you can request that they move their links to your site to a higher traffic page for a short period of time so that you can get re-indexed.

They may be willing to do this if you remind them that the links from your site to theirs are more valuable once you’ve been indexed than they are when you are unindexed.

If you submit to the search engines properly the first time and you have a good SEO maintenance plan, you’ll only need to submit your site once. You might consider hiring someone to keep your site regularly updated, as regularly-updated sites rank higher. If you have recently suffered a ranking tumble, use Google Sitemaps to get your page back into Google.

This is the fastest method available and is the strongest damage control that you will be able to perform.

Build great content around your keywords or phrases. Remember that content is King for both visitors and search engines. Your content must be extremely relevant to your key words at this point. You don’t want to try to pull a fast one because this was probably the reason that your ranking tumbled in the first place.

Remember: When you are recovering from a rank tumble, you are at the search engines’ mercy. You cannot possibly recover if you try to do anything that doesn’t seem right to the search engines.

Submit your website properly to each search engine and directory by hand, making sure you understand each site’s rules. Using automatic submissions is just not a good idea. There are so many things that can go wrong and you just don’t know what goes on behind the scenes.

Work by hand and if possible, contact the search engine or directory and ask them if there is a specific reason that your site was suddenly removed. Ask them if there is any action that you can take to make up for any mistakes that you may have made.

Get as many one-way links as you can from directories or pay to have good websites link to yours. One-way links are better than two-way ones.

Monitor your results regularly to find out what’s working and what’s not. Don’t be afraid to make changes.

Keep all these things in mind and you can recover from a rankings tumble easily.

Andy Huang

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.

To your success!
Andy Huang