Search engine positions are a little bit like your friends in primary school. They change from week to week, sometimes even from day to day - and sometimes even depending on who's looking. Anyone who's been involved with SEO for a while, whether it be a web professional or an e-commerce webmaster looking to maximise their profit from online sales will be aware of the nervous energy generated while watching your listings fluctuate in the SERPs.
The best approach to monitoring your listings is to be vigilant, never admit defeat and be prepared to become best friends with your copywriter because they have their work cut out for them and probably even deserve a raise - copywriting for SEO is definitely not a walk in the park. It involves trial and error, constant tweaking and plenty of thinking outside the box. Those that are already involved in creating copy for their site will be all too aware that their job never ends.
This week my attention has been brought to an interesting article written by an SEO copywriter who describes an experiment she conducted with keywords on her site. The result being that she brought her site from languishing somewhere in the over 50s right up to the first page. She, of course, admits that site rankings have a lot to do with link popularity and as such did absolutely nothing with links for the duration of the experiment. Her motivation behind the experiment came after she ran a listings report only to find the site was performing rather well for keywords that were nowhere in the copy on the page. Hmmm - that's a bit curious. After some investigation she found said terms featuring in the ALT attributes (text used to describe the informational content of an image) and title tags of the page which lead her to wonder if... (cue Carrie in a Sex in the City moment!) ...despite ALT attributes previously carrying a lot of weight with search engines and then being downgraded due to blatant ALT attribute abuse, have their level of importance been reinstated?
To cut a long story short she surmised that there is no easy answer, no foolproof formula to SEO copywriting. You need a little bit of this and a little bit of that:
"It takes balance, testing and tracking to find out what works for your particular pages [take] one step at a time and trace your progress. Did something cause a positive movement? Keep it. If something causes a negative shift, take it out."
In the immortal words of my copyeditor: here here!
If you ever feel that your one on one battle with the search engines is getting you down, then here is a little something to make you, web professional or interested webmaster alike, feel better. The snap shot below shows that even Google - yes Google! - doesn't have the number one spot on their own search engine for the very key phrase 'search engine'. They rank 3rd and 4th behind Dogpile and Alta Vista of all people.
How is this so I hear you cry? They barely have a market share between them in term of users so how on earth do they pip the master to the post? We thought it might be in terms of link popularity - nope Google has around 1.6 million back links and Dogpile has a measly 88,400. Yahoo! doesn't even feature in the top 10 and they have almost 1.3 million links pointing into the site and a page rank of 9, which certainly equals Alta Vista and is higher than Dogpile. Back to the drawing board...
Eureka! We may have cracked it. What do Dogpile and Alta Vista have in common? They were both search engines back in the days when Google was a mere twinkle in the eyes of some scruffy students, and was not a verb but a way to describe someone with eyes wide open in a crazy fashion. Dogpile was the original Meta Search Engine when 'meta' was commonly known as a prefix to many words rather than a word itself. They have history, they have trust. These factors remain hugely important factors in search engine rankings. Your site needs to have consistency, reliability, stability and, it seems, a history. Have we ever told you about the story of the marathon and the sprint?
Well, don't lose hope people, and hone your patience skills - SEO is the marathon, it's the long term goal. It's a battle of endurance and the staring down of failure - but the rewards are so sweet. Hang on in there people, and remember, SERP results can change for myriad reasons, not least because of testing on the part of the search engine in question. Hold off those knee-jerk reactions and hunker down for the long-term.
