Maintaining your search engine ranking and site traffic

Maintaining Your SEO Rankings

Once you have gone through the initial process of optimizing your website properly for organic rankings, you’ll want to be sure to also maintain all of the good work you’ve just done in order to continue reaping the rewards in the long term. The steps I’ve outlined below are things you will want to do on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis.

 

You’ll want to make sure to learn about new trends by following blogs and journals for new updates in the SEO/SEM community and to follow algorithm updates such as Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon, Possum, Fred and RankBrain. Some other important topics to follow are the core updates so you can better understand the changes and updates in their algorithm which occur several times throughout the year. Below I’ve detailed some of the websites I’d recommend following in order to keep yourself in the know.

 

Many SEO Journals cover digital marketing and advertising technology with daily news, trends and announcements. It also offers feature articles, expert input, and tips for managing and improving the marketing for your business. It is also an excellent resource for following the algorithms and core updates which you will need to know to make future adjustments to your website. Focus on using this website for changes such as core updates and if there are fixes or improvements you need to add to your website to grow your rankings in the SERPs. Pay attention to the homepage that will list all of the major news that could affect your website or give you an edge against your competition. Some are led by some of the most experienced members of the SEO and SEM community, this forum will help you better understand what the current trends are and what is needed to improve your ranking and updates occurring in the industry. You should focus on the latest buzz and trends that are updated quite frequently throughout the day. There is a lot of information coming out of this website, so as you get more and more familiar with the terms and industry you will be able to decide which ones best apply to you.

 

 

Webmaster Tools are designed to give you an in-depth view of how to better understand how your website is performing on their Search. These tools are an online software that offers its users tools and reports that will assist them with viewing Search traffic and your website’s performance and issues you need to fix on your website so you can grow your business on their search engine.

 

When you use webmaster tools you are going to be able to view a wealth of information about how Bing views your website, traffic and broken images andcode you need to correct. This is a great tool to get a heads up on how you are ranking on the platform.

 

You may have noticed that the software listed below contains software which has already been discussed in Chapter 6 when you were locating coding errors in your website and correcting them. Listing them again is essential since you will need to use them again for future updates so that you can maintain your rankings.

 

Use software that spiders and crawls your entire website and analyzes and gathers information about each individual page. It includes features that display issues with broken links, duplicate content, improvements to title and meta data, finds redirects, etc. Depending on how large your website is it can take from a few minutes to an hour to run but it is worth the wait. It will give you some of the best information on improvements to your SEO that you will find.

 

How to use it: You will have to pay for a subscription for the software before you can download it to your computer. Once you download it, open it and add the root URL (homepage URL) of your website to the URL field to run an audit on your website. Once completed it will give you over 20 tabs that will provide a comprehensive breakdown full of improvements you can make to your website, export of data, items for you to consider changing, and more.

 

Software that helps improve your understanding of your marketing needs. With its all-in-one tool suite that helps you improve your website visibility, your primary website topic from an SEO standpoint, PPC ad campaigns, competitive research, and more. It is also an excellent resource for discovering poor quality links pointing toward your website that you can utilize to add to Google Console Disavow tool.

 

Platforms that are designed to analyze your website and improve your pages. As an SEO crawler and log analyzer you will find the improvements it has to offer helpful to understanding your marketing needs.

 

Disavow links are a method used to remove harmful links that are pointing towards your website which could damage your rankings with low-quality links. Search engines offer you a way to remove these backlinks coming to your website by using your account to identify links pointing toward your website so you can decide which links you would like to remove. When adding links to your disavow list, I recommend using SEMrush which has its own tool that locates links from around the web that point back to your website. It classifies links as either harmful or safe by a ranking scale which ultimately lets you decide which links you want to keep or remove. Once you compile a list of harmful links that you do not want pointing toward your website then you can manually upload a file or automate into disavow tools to request them not allow the links to be counted against you.

 

You should note that search engines will sometimes show very different harmful links to disavow so you must manually create a list for each one if you want to catch every possible bad link pointing toward your website. If this seems like too much work you can just connect your accounts and it will do this for you automatically. Be careful using the disavow tools as removing bad links can improve your rankings but removing good links can harm your rankings.