average, you’ll need to devote at least a couple of hours a day to your ongoing SEO efforts, and at
times, more than that will be required.In the time that you allot for ongoing SEO efforts, there are plenty of things to do. But it should all
start with some form of position monitoring and web-site analytics. Position monitoring can usually
be accomplished by a software application. But be careful, Google specifically calls the use of auto-
mated rank checkers a violation of its terms of service, and may disable your ability to connect to
and do searches on Google.com. Moderate use of such software probably won’t be a problem. Many
people use these tools to track their positions. So if you can’t take time out of your schedule every
day to look up the rank of your web site by keyword in every search engine you’re targeting, an
application to handle it could provide the position information you need.Monitoring your web analytics is also an important part of your ongoing SEO, because this is where
you’ll find information about where your site visitors are coming from, how long they’re staying on
your site, and what pages they visit while they’re there. An analytics program should also tell you
how many people bounce— come to your site and leave immediately. A bounce is an indication that
your site is not optimized properly. Visitors who bounce from your site are not finding what they
thought they would find, based on the search engine results they clicked through.You may also want to monitor other portions of your SEO strategy. For example, monitoring key-
words and links is always a good idea. Keywords can change. The popular term for something in
your industry could be one thing today and something completely different tomorrow. You have to
stay on top of trends in order to take advantage of them.Monitoring your links is a matter of making sure they lead exactly where you expect them to lead.
You may also want to keep an eye on where links are coming to your site from.Incoming links could
be damaging to you if they’re coming from unrelated web sites, or if the sites they’re coming from
have been determined by search engines to be “bad neighborhoods.” A bad neighborhood is an
unethical site or group of sites.As with monitoring your search rankings, monitoring links and keywords is also a task that lends itself
to automation. A good software application can keep track of these elements of your SEO plan and let
you know when you need to pay attention and improve your SEO efforts in one area or another.In addition to monitoring your links, you’ll also want to add to links, and to content, over time. If
you add hundreds of links to your site overnight, search engine crawlers will likely not be impressed.
Instead, they’ll look at those links with suspicion and might even make the assumption that you’re
spamming the search engine. If that happens, you’ll be delisted from search rankings until you fix
what you’ve done wrong.It’s far better to add links to your site a few at a time. You can add a few every day or every week,
depending on how many people want to link to your site. However, if you try to add all your links
on a single day, it’s not going to look good for you.266
Part IV Maintaining SEO
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