Poor results or a slump in SEO performance can lead nervous Webmasters to take extreme steps in the conversion of their site. While some improved SEO techniques and greater efforts can lead to a general improvement in search rankings it is essential that you avoid the temptation to over optimise a website. While it isn’t done to intentionally manipulate the search results, search engines may deem it as such and penalise your site accordingly – in some cases this could mean a further drop in rankings while in extreme cases it can lead to an entire site being removed from the index.

Ever Flux

Gone are the days when a search engine revised its index every few weeks, and the major engines like Google are in a state of constant change. It can take a few days for a new link to be noted and a little longer before you get the full benefit of it; Google especially considers the age of virtually everything regarding your website including incoming links. The search results are built afresh every time somebody conducts a search and this means that some pages naturally drop in rankings while others improve.

Keep Building Links Strategically

If you do suffer a drop in ranking then the first thing to do is not to panic. Hopefully you have a diverse traffic range that includes traffic from other keywords, other search engines, and other marketing sources to pick up the slack. In the meantime, continue to build links strategically without falling foul of any of the “get traffic quick” schemes that can plague the Internet marketing arena. These generally utilise either unethical or ineffective SEO techniques that can cost you considerably more in the long run.

Add New Pages

Consider adding new pages of high quality content. This allows you to target more keywords with each page you add and conduct some good intralinking around your site. Meanwhile ensure that you continue with your existing SEO campaigns for those pages that already exist but don’t get too carried away changing existing content. Give it a look over, ensure that it includes synonyms and semantically related keywords and then move on.

Avoid Anything That Appears Unethical

Suddenly acquiring 100 links in the space of a few days is going to look artificial to the search engines, especially if they are low quality, bulk links. While it’s true that you need to build links you should ensure that you only build high quality ones and if you can create website content that will naturally lead to inbound links from other sites then that’s even better – another good reason to add new pages of high quality SEO content.

Ethical SEO

Search engines come down hard on any website or website owner that they believe are attempting to artificially manipulate their results without providing a good user experience. Everything you do should be relevant to your existing site so new pages should be on a relevant topic while inbound links should be from relevant sites using relevant keywords as anchor text. In the same vein you should avoid panicking and continue with your SEO efforts to get your rankings back up again.

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