• SEO Rankings Can Go Up … And They Can Go Down •
• There Is Usually One Of Three Basic Issues Affecting A Rankings Change •

I have been writing about how I am able to maintain top SEO rankings for the keyword phrase garden art project: read about it here.

At the time of that article (March 25, 2008), I held the #1 and #2 Google SERP positions. Today, I see I have the #2 and #3 positions, and also that the total number of SERPs (search engine result pages) that Google is showing has dropped significantly from 2.4 million to about 1.2 million.

Here is a screenshot I took a moment ago:

See what can happen in just a few weeks with rankings and other search engine results? The number of competing pages dropped significantly and I would have thought I’d have stayed up at the top with my ranking positions, but I haven’t.

But you know what? I’m not alarmed, nor really concerned, as little fluctuations can happen from time to time.  I will just sit back for now and see what happens within another week or two. If this competing website is still at #1, then I will make a decision as to what I need to do to try and attain the top spots again.

Trust me, I am not boo-hooing, as #2 and #3 are still WONDERFUL Google rankings to have.

Why Do Keyword Phrase Rankings Fluctuate?

You can pretty well bet there is more than one reason why my rankings, or yours, or anybody else’s may take a small nose dive, a huge drop, or on the positive side, a rise in the rankings from week to week, or month to month. Some of us refer to it as “The Rankings Roller Coaster”.

There is one thing you can be sure of, and that is this: NOTHING  is for sure in the search engine rankings wars! LOL  Just as in life, the ONLY thing for sure is that things are in a constant state of change. And this applies to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and all the other search engines as well.

The Three Main Reasons For SEO Ranking Fluctuations

The three basic reasons for drops or rises are either you’ve changed your site in some manner; competitors’ sites have changed; or the search engines’ algorithms changed. Be aware fluctuations can be one or a combination of these three.

To give you a little more insight, here’s a few more things to think about:

On-site issues :  Page content, products, file names, even the actual coding of your website might change every now and then, on down to daily or even hourly changes. (It all depends upon how you maintain your site.)  Anything can cause a slight or even drastic fluctuation in the rankings.

However, all being kept about the same as far as what you normally maintain and “do” on your site, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about if you dip down a notch or two.

But, if you’ve caused a coding error, or caused a glitch somewhere on your site, you might experience bigger search engine ranking problems.

Back-links (in-pointing) links :  There can be a change or drop in some good quality links that point to your website from other well-ranking websites. This is something we usually haven’t too much control over. This is also something that will happen to even the best of sites.

Hopefully you’ve not fallen prey to buying “link building” software or hiring companies that promise to get you high rankings by purchasing in-pointing links. Normally these are junk links and though you may see a spike in your rankings, it’s a short lived situation. You can also hurt your rankings by going after links from websites that are in non-related niches, or in “spam niches”, and the like.

Just keep pursuing good quality, links from relevant sites to help counteract the times when you do lose a back-link.

Server down time :  Sometimes SEO ranking drops may be due to nothing more than your website being inaccessible when the search engines try to spider your content. Usually a single instance of inaccessibility won’t affect your rankings. But, if your site is down repeatedly during crawl times … you have a serious issue that needs fixing quick!

Remember: If the search engine bots cannot spider your site when they show up at your front door, then they’ve got nothing to analyze for your ranking positions. The solution to this possibility is to have a good reliable web host provider.

A change in search algorithms :  This is one area that you and I have absolutely NO control over. Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other SE’s have these very smart analytical-type employees sitting in their offices figuring out complicated mathematical formulas that instruct the search engines on how to process the terms you and I are searching for in relation to the gazillions of web pages filled with another gazillion subjects.  Whew … that was a mouth full!

In other words, it’s a well guarded secret as to exactly what factors are taken into consideration to deliver you or me good ranking positions. Don’t get me wrong … yes we can get a pretty good idea of what causes “good” rankings versus crummy or non-existent rankings, but the absolute answers are locked up somewhere in the search engine vaults! :) 

Suffice it to say it is true that the better the content and more theme oriented your website is, the better you will do in the rankings. And the better you’ve succeeded with your SEO optimization efforts, the better you will probably do in the rankings, too.

And then there is your competition :  If we could get rid of the competition, we’d all be in great shape! But seriously folks, new sites come onto the scene; other sites add new pages of quality content; maybe other sites gain a few more quality in-pointing links than you have; maybe a competitor starts paying better attention to their search engine optimization efforts than you are; maybe someone just wrote a couple of new articles using a keyword you didn’t have much competition for previously … the list goes on and on.

Do you get the idea of all the variables that can come into play when it comes to a drop (or rise) in search engine rankings?

I will be touching upon more of these issues in greater depth in future posts. But for now, I do hope you’ve gained some insight into the reasons for “the SEO rankings roller coaster” effect.

• Some Dos and Don’ts When Inter-Linking Pages On Your Site •
• Keep It Easy For Your Visitor •

As far as basic SEO steps are concerned, it is important to provide good HTML linking to help your website rank higher in the search engines. In addition, the HTML links (called ‘hyperlinks’ because when you click on the link it takes you to another page) between all your website’s pages should also be thought of as a user-friendly, ease-of-navigation issue.

What do I mean by this? Well, let me use a real life example from a website that I am currently hired to not only search engine optimize, but to also rearrange so that the site visitors can more easily navigate their way around.

I’ll share this example: the site owner emails a very nice, content rich newsletter to her list each month. She also smartly utilizes each newsletter as a new page of content for her website. So, we can all agree that this would mean that she places twelve new, keyword focused web pages on her site every year.

In the simplest form of navigation hierarchy, it would make the most sense to have a navigation button (this is an HTML linking example) that would link us to a second-tier page where she could list out each month’s newsletter with a brief overview of what the subject was. These hyperlinks would take the visitor to the actual month’s newsletter.  The newsletters would site on what would be the third-tier.

Here’s an example of the newsletter links she could have on the second-tier page:

January 2008: Aromatherapy Using Rosemary  The herb rosemary helps bring clarity of mind. Learn how to use it when defining your New Year’s intentions.

February 2008: Aromatherapy Using The Essence of Rose  Yes, this is the month of love! Learn all about the scent of Rose and why it’s used for love and romantic intentions!

Each month’s newsletter would be hyperlinked in this fashion. Each newsletter would be sitting on its own web page. Each page’s file name would be keyword optimized such as the file name for January could be:
        www.nameofsite.com/january2008-aromatherapy-rosemary.html
        www.nameofsite.com/february2008-aromatherapy-rose.html

Unfortunately, This Is Not The HTML Linking Structure Currently In Use

My client has made a big mistake by linking her newsletters in the following way:

•  She has not provided a landing page from the navigational HTML link to a second-tier page as I have mentioned;

•  Her HTML linking structure for all the newsletters consist of one link at the bottom of each newsletter, stating “click here for last month’s newsletter”;

•  And worse yet … it isn’t the current month’s newsletter that is accessed when you click on her “Newsletter” navigation button, no! It is the oldest newsletter.

Can you understand how clumsy and aggravating this is to someone who wants to access her most current newsletter to see what she’s wriring about this month? Or to someone who wants to see a nice overview of all her newsletters because they wish to reference back to one they had read months before?

You need to think out the HTML linking you’ll use on your site. Not only is it advantageous for SEO ranking purposes to have all your website pages inter-linked, but it is also most important to have a very carefully thought out, easy-to-navigate website for your visitors.

Make your HTML linking structure simple, clearly defined and easy for your visitor to figure out ‘where to go next’. This is but one more way to you can encourage your visitors to stay on your site for a longer period of time. And the longer they stay, the more option you have to make them aware of your products or services!

• My Client’s Site Uses An Image For The Entire Navigation Bar •
• Let’s Understand Why This Is An SEO No-No •

Dear oh dear.  I am currently working with a client who wants to gain a stronger online presence and to begin to get top organic rankings. As it normally is with the clients who engage my professional SEO services, her site is invisible in the SERPs.

The web designer she hired to design what is visually a very attractive site, did the search engine optimization for her.  Let’s just say that his SEO blunders are a great post for another day!

I’d like to touch upon one SEO mistake that is adversely affecting her website, and affects many other unsuspecting people’s sites.  It’s the issue of her navigation bar and navigation links. It’s an image! A big no-no for SEO purposes.

The spiders have nothing to follow with her current image linking structure.  Yes, the use of alt attributes can be used to get around a situation like this. It’s not a best-case way to solve it, but if you assign your keyword rich information into the alt attributes for each image being used for a clickable link, the spiders will then understand what is going on.

But my client’s problem cannot be improved via the fix I just mentioned.

Her entire navigation bar (which includes 16 links) is one image!  There is a pretty background with sixteen words superimposed upon the image. I am not an html coding expert by any means, but when I looked at the coding that makes that image clickable for those sixteen unique “links” … well I scratched my head in amazement!  I guess I could say it was very “creative”! lol 

The coding to make each of the sixteen words “work” as clickable links is set up in the most archaic formatting. It’s just plain bad. Obviously that “web designer” my client had hired wasn’t very adept at clean, SEO friendly coding.

My recommendation will be for her to utilize a CSS menu (I’d like to see her whole website recoded using a CSS format). For a short term fix, I’ll advise her to get rid of the entire image and use a table structure.

Navigation links need to be crawlable by the spiders. As do all the other links on your pages. Take a look at your website. Are you utilizing images in ways that can hinder the search engines from crawling your website ?