How Your Income Is Effected By Website Rankings

How-to get the most from website traffic

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.

It you find that your website is miles away from the top 20, don’t be discouraged – you can change that! You may need to re-evaluate your keywords, and try to find new ones that are more relevant to your site. Many search engines have human-edited rankings for the most commonly searched-for phrases, and it is often difficult to get in that list. Good content is the best way to increase your chances of getting a high ranking for a certain topic. The more popular that your page is with the masses, the more popular it will be with search engines.

Search engines are a perfect example of “the chicken or the egg.” In this case, there is an answer! Search engines attempt to deliver sites that the populous has deemed important, not the other way around. This is why it is so important that you have good, relevant content and plenty of it. If you want to check to see if a single web page on your site has been indexed, visit the search engine and enter the complete URL, like this: http://www.yourpage.com/yourpagename.html. If the search engine has indexed that particular page then it will come back with a description of it. If it hasn’t then you’ll see a message saying something like “Sorry, no information is available for that URL”.

On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or that contain your URL on the page. You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods, but we would recommend that you consider using online tools or downloadable software that will allow you to check these things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to monitor.

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.

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