Keyword Ranking Article
Obsessing About Keyword Ranking Can Decrease It - by Deborah Brousseau
Wikipedia defines the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy" as: a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true. This post is about the exact opposite of self-fulfilling prophecy. If only it were true that we could say, "My site is going to be number one in the search engines for my keywords." and then it would come true! Unfortunately, if you obsess about the ranking of your keywords, especially if you have a lot of them, it could actually decrease your rank.
How is that possible you ask? When a site owner or SEO is obsessed about where their site ranks in the search engines for specific keywords, they typically run keyword ranking reports. That seems harmless right? There are several software packages that let you import keyword lists, press a button and get a report that tells you their exact position in the major search engines. Lots of people run these reports. Everyone's doing it! Unfortunately, it may be having a detrimental effect on your SERP rankings.
How do those reports work? When you run them, the software sends queries to the search engines. It's just like you typing in a search into Google and looking through the results until you find your site. The difference is that the software programs are doing a search every few seconds, which "spams" the search engine. You wouldn't want millions of people querying your site/server daily or weekly if it wasn't benefiting you and neither do they. But how does Google know it's you? You enter your domain into the software so it knows when to stop scanning the search results. You basically tell it to search Google for the word peanuts and to report back to you when it "stopped" or when it found your domain.
OK - so if you shouldn't use keyword ranking software, how do you know when your SEO efforts are working? The best way to tell if your keywords are ranking well in the SERPs is to monitor your site traffic in Google Analytics, or a similar program. These applications tell you what keywords are driving traffic, and how much traffic is being driven. After all, if your site is ranking well for competitive keywords, your traffic will increase as well. Likewise, if your traffic decreases, that most likely indicates a drop in SERP positioning.
The lesson here is to monitor your analytics applications, and stop spamming Google and other search engines with keyword ranking report software. Trust me, I know
If you'd like a consultant that stays on top of the ever changing algorithms of the search engines, contact Blue Web Technologies, Inc. We are certified Search Engine Marketers and we will be up front and honest about the changes that need to be made on your site. We look forward to working with you on achieving a good SERP ranking.
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