Many people believe that once a site is SEO and up and running, thousands of new visitors are on their way. Simply put, this is a false assumption. SEO is hard work and is an ongoing effort. Let’s face it, the Internet is always changing and there is always someone out there, marketing veteran or web site new comer, which will build the bigger, better and SEO site.

    Each and every search engine on the Internet has its own rules as to how sites are ranked. If you are lucky enough to be ranked number one on one search engine does not mean you are lucky enough to be ranked number one on all of them. As a general rule of thumb, if your keywords appear in your title, meta tags, and the content of your site, you are more likely to have higher rankings across the multitude of search engines.

    Understanding your logs will give you the most insight to what is working for your site, and what is not. The logs contain information such as what keywords are used to find your site, which pages clients are entering on, how long they stay, and if they are visiting multiple pages. This information gives you valuable information on what keywords you should be using more often and in the title and meta tags.

    Do a search of the search engines. This will help you find out which keywords are gaining the highest rankings, which ones are failing, and change your site according to your findings. Keep in mind that different search engines use different criteria, so keeping pages that do well on some but not on others will be helpful, but try to stick to pages that are doing well on all of them.

    After you figure out what keywords and pages are working, resubmit your site to search engines. This will help sites recognize changes to your site more readily and hopefully improve your rankings faster. Keep in mind that search engines are bombarded by requests and resubmissions, so it can take several days or weeks to see the results of your work. Be patient.

    This is a lot of work for a business to do on a regular basis, so hiring a company to do this for you is a reasonable step to take. Large businesses may hire a department to take care of this for them, but small businesses and self employed people need to focus on their business. Taking care of details like this is up to organizations like Flatiron SEO.