Monitor and Tweak Your Way to Great Rankings - Part 2

No one apart from the search engines knows which algorithms (the rules used to determine site rankings) are used. Each search engine algorithm is different. Therefore it is almost impossible to get all of the pages on your site ranked for your target keywords at the first try.

This is where monitoring and tweaking comes into play.

Part 1 showed you how to monitor where your site is in the search engine rankings. (Part 1 - Monitoring Your Site's Rankings can be found here). Part 2 will cover tweaking.

Part 2 - Tweaking Your Site's Content

What do if no page of your site shows is ranked for any keyword? Try picking an unusual phrase used in your site and undertake a search for that phrase with quotes around it. If you're not showing up for this unique phrase then it could be that your site is not indexed correctly (see previous article for information on checking that)

If you're starting to appear in the results for some search phrases on some search engines then don't be concerned. It takes differing amounts of time for the individual search engines to index your site and update the result pages.

If only a few phrases are not showing in the search results then it may be time to revisit the written text on your site. For each search phrase that isn't ranking:

• Find the page targeting the keyword.
• Check the meta tags - is the phrase in the title, description and keyword tags?
• Check the page - is the phrase in the <h1> tag?
• Check the text - is the phrase used once per paragraph? Does the page read well? If not reduce the number of occurrences.
• Check the images - make sure the phrase appears in the 'alt' tag of the site.
• Check incoming internal links - do you use the phrase in the link text.
• If the page is sharing focus with other phrases you may want to move the phrase its own page. If you create a new page you will need to create around 400-600 words specifically targeting that phrase.
• You may want to alter the text that you use for reciprocal links for other sites to include the phrase.

This articles concludes the Introduction to SEO series. Hope this helped you to optimize your site. If you have any questions or would like to know more about Elixir Systems search engine optimization you can contact me on dylan.downhill@elixirsystems.com.

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