Maintaining Search Engine Position

Once you have established your site on the search engine there is an ongoing process to continually update and renter your web site on a monthly or bimonthly basis. If you have hired an agency to design your web site be sure to ask them if the contract price also covers the cost of regular maintenance, and if so for how long? Many a "new" web site has quickly become stale if no one maintains it. A web site is like a car, it needs regular oil changes and monthly maintenance. Often, the only thing to do is ensure the web site has not been dropped from the index which can happen naturally. Check on things once a month, and if pages are missing, then resubmit. It is worth submitting all your key pages to Infoseek, AltaVista and HotBot, as these pages then appear within a few days to two weeks.

After a site is up and listed many of the major search engines will send robots back to check it; if there have been no changes the robots soon learn to visit it less often until it is not visited at all and slips into obscurity. Keeping fresh content circulating through your web site is one way of triggering a spider's indexing reflexes, resulting in more frequent visits and in some cases, in a higher, better position on the search engine.

There are popularity engines such as used by Netscape's "What's Related" catalogue where results are listed by the direct hit popularity of other search engine user choices. Sites such as Google weigh results by link popularity so that the more links there are pointing to a given site the higher up the result ranks it will appear. Thus a web site owner who maintains his/her site and actively seeks our reciprocal links with other related sites will enjoy a higher listing.

Many search engines focus only on the keywords they encounter near the top of your HTML. Whether your site is about commerce, information or entertainment your page title should state the site's purpose. Spiders also catalogue keywords read in document structural elements such heading tags ("/H1, H2, etc./"). Make those page titles count! Despite all the recent changes, page titles continue to be very important You should include a brief, concise but enticing description of your page to be displayed in your search engine listing.

Additionally you can link directly to similar sites through a web ring organization such as webring.org. This is a great way to boost traffic to your site as well as to increase the number of links to your site and thereby increase the ranking within popularity indexed search engines.