Why You Need a SEO Maintenance Plan

A search engine optimization maintenance service plan willensure that your site will continue to increase in itsrankings, attract more visitors and make more sales. It'snot enough to simply design your web site, have itoptimized for the search engines and expect it tocontinually rank well. If left alone, you may soon lose thebusiness your web site initially generated.

What should be included in a SEO maintenance service plan?

1. Monitor search engine rankings - there will be manyfluctuations in your search engine rankings. This may bedue to search engines changing their ranking formulas, orcompetitors trying to get ahead of you. More sites areadded to the web each day so you need to monitor yoursearch engine rankings to be competitive. I create monthlyranking reports on where your site is currently ranked foreach of the major search engines.

2. Traffic Tracking - it's essential to know where most ofyour traffic is coming from so you can make adjustments toyour marketing strategies. For example if most of yourtraffic is coming from one particular page, you may want toplace your best products on that page to get more sales. Ianalyze your site statistics (if they are available fromyour web host) to check how much traffic you are receiving,where is it coming from and what keywords are being used tofind your site.

3. Keyword research - web sites are being added to the webevery day, therefore keywords that once got high rankingsmay no longer work. You may have high search enginepositions for your most important keyword phrases but ifyou are not receiving any traffic from those phrases, youwill need to evaluate the keywords that you have used.Attaining a number 1 ranking for keywords that no one will search for, will not increase your traffic.

Researching new keywords is essential to maintain goodrankings. I analyze the current keywords used on your siteand research and add new ones. Once the keywords have beenchosen, the content should be updated to reflect them. Thismay include subtle changes to the meta tags, page titlesand text headings; or it could involve adding additionalsections to the site, rewriting content and reorganizingthe web site's structure. It all depends on the specificrequirements of the site and market.

4. Competitive analysis - an integral part of search engineoptimization is determining what keywords your competitorsare using. I analyze where your competitors are currentlyranked for the same keywords you are using for your webpages. I also check how many competitors you have for eachof the major search engines. If there are too manycompetitors for a particular keyword it may be better touse less competitive keywords for your web pages or usethem in conjunction with the most popular ones.

I will also analyze the link popularity of your competitorsto determine how many incoming links they have and what thequality of those links are. You should not link tounrelated sites and ideally link to sites that alreadyattract a lot of traffic.

5. Adding fresh content - web sites that continuouslyupdate and/or expand their content, usually experiencehigher rankings than stagnant web sites. New keywordsshould first be researched before adding new content. Thiswill help boost your traffic and rankings because visitorswill have more ways to land on your site based on thekeywords they entered in the search engines. One great wayto achieve this is to add new articles to your site on aregular basis.

6. Web copy analysis - getting a lot of traffic to yoursite does not guarantee sales. It primarily depends on howeffective your web copy is. (Read my article: " How toWrite Effective Web Copy " www.isitebuild.com/web-copy).You want to convert visitors into sales. I analyze how yourweb copy is structured on the page, what words you use, ifit is written for your visitors plus check it for spellingand grammatical errors.

7. Boost link popularity - this refers to the amount ofother quality web sites that have links pointing back toyours. The more quality links there are, the better youwill rank on the major search engines. I extensivelyresearch other sites related to yours and add or exchangelinks with them. This may require a links/resources page tobe added to your site.

8. Tweaking web site structure and navigation - if visitorsare having a difficult time navigating your site, readingthe content or experience broken links, then I will repairor tweak the site to make it more suitable for yourvisitors.

Conclusion - your web site should be an integral part ofyour business plan. It may be the first view your visitorshave of your business. You therefore should update andmaintain it regularly so your visitors will want to revisitand keep doing business with you.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com.

Choose a Search Engine Optimization Plan or SEO Maintenance Plan that fits your web site. Visit: http://www.isitebuild.com/sitepromotion