WIB: What advice can you offer business women looking for an SEO company so that they can avoid being taken?
Mr. Barremore:Read your “'Women in Business” column at About.com, of course! I've gone over it in every detail; this is great stuff. You deserve a lot of credit for highlighting crucial information about SEO and in clear, easy to understand language. There's not much I can add to it. As with any business decisions, women will want to be informed buyers and make choices based on facts, logic and common sense. Another good idea is to request several quotes and strategies from different SEO companies.
WIB: Are there ongoing or monthly SEO or site monitoring services that a business owner can benefit from? For example, the major search engines can change their algorithms which can affect a sites ranking. If a site’s search engine returns are starting to go down, what should a site owner do?
Mr. Barremore: Depending on your needs, there are plenty of software tools and online services to monitor your site's ranking; some are free, others are available at nominal cost. Keep in mind that search engines have a TOS (Terms of Service) which may prohibit automated queries to its database. Legitimate resources will make use of an API or other methods to help ensure analysis within these TOS parameters.
Here are a few popular resources:
- Software: Advance Web Ranking
- Online: SEOmoz.org and Digital Point
There will always be new sites coming online, millions of new pages being created daily and countless thousands of website owners beginning to implement SEO. Search engine rankings are forever changing, fluid and dynamic. One site will displace another based on a plethora of data and how each site is interpreted by a search engine's programming, its algorithm.
Should the site owner notice a major drop in rankings for keywords they're watching, it may only be a hiccup, or a temporary discrepancy between data centers. Give it some time; it may change right back. Never do anything in haste.
If the dip in rankings persist, it's likely the result of some change you made, or something that has happened beyond your control like an off-site resource being penalized as a "bad neighborhood", or the uncommon and dreaded "database flush" sometimes experienced. If a drop is for a single keyword phrase, either you or your SEO company can reinforce its positions by creating better content, link structure, or the optimization of the page in question.
As I'm sure you know well, search engines fully depend upon the content of other websites and exist for two basic reasons; 1) to facilitate research and 2) to provide a platform for advertisers. So long as site owners produce exceptional content which people find useful, their websites will be rewarded with search engine rankings commensurate to their quality.
