Business Coaching

SEO rankings can be finicky, unless you are consistent with what you do.

If you have been reading this blog, you know that search engine optimization (SEO) is a key part of business marketing these days. Every business wants to be sure that they can be found when someone uses a search engine to find them.

But sometimes, your SEO ranking can drop because of factors you may not have considered. Among those factors are age of the site, your site’s content, the keyword density of your articles and the links that connect your site to other sites. There are solutions for these problems that can take your SEO back to the top of the search.

If your company’s site is old, that’s a good thing because it should be easy to find and stable. The problem can be if the content on your site is old and static, or never updated. The easiest way to ensure you’ll always have fresh content is by blogging: just write a regular blog an post it on your site.

Another revelation as to why your SEO ranking might be low is a lack of content. Many search engines won’t even list a site unless it has at least 10 pages on it. Keyword density also plays a big role in SEO ranking. Be sure to pepper the key words you believe people will search when looking for your business in articles or blogs throughout your site. The most places you use key words the better. Finally, you always want to have reciprocal links on your site with other businesses so people that view their sites will naturally navigate to yours.

So what can you do to ensure your SEO ranking stays high? First off, if you aren’t computer savvy, hire someone who is. Second, use multiple websites for your business. The more places you can be found on the Internet, the better your chances that customers will be able to find you. Finally, be sure to constantly update your site to be sure you have fresh content and enough pages to be properly searched.

When it comes to search engines, do you use the reliable standby Google, the newer Bing, or any of the other search engines out there (Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, etc)?

Here’s something interesting that may sway some die-hard Google users to start using Bing: On New Year’s Eve, Times Square was evacuated when the bomb squad was called to investigate a suspicious van. Don’t worry – it was nothing. But what was interesting was what the two search engines turned up as people in the city were scrambling about for information.

Search engines pull up all sorts of websites depending on keywords, including results from Twitter and Facebook. Simply typing the generic “Times Square” into Google turned up news results that were two days old about New Year’s Eve events and preparations for the upcoming festivities. When typed into Bing, however, yielded real-time headlines from various news outlets like ABC and CNN, thus giving the scrambling Internet searchers information they were looking for.

Now, this isn’t to discredit Google at all. In fact, Google was showing real-time results, too..theirs were just hidden. Google’s real-time updates page under “show options” and then “updates” with any search, had all the good stuff; headlines, tweets, everything that described what was going on in real-time was on that page.

If Google just moved its real-time results to its main search page instead of hidden on another page, it’d not only be better for Google, but it’d be great for search engine users: less frustration because they find what they’re looking for.

Use this Google/Bing example to think in terms of your own business…is there anything that your company could improve upon and beat competitors to?