September 2009, Issue 50
Changing Rankings . . . What's
Up?
Watching
your placement in the search engines can be a daunting task
and for those who do watch . . . a confusing task to say the
least. Often your website will bounce around within the
results pages of the search engines for no apparent
reason.
Well
there really are apparent reasons . . . you just need to know
what they are. There are three main reasons for these
fluctuations:
- You changed your website
- Your competitors changed their website
- The search engines changed how they index websites
(algorithm change)
Changing
Your Website
Changing
your website isn't a bad thing, in fact to keep up you really
need to make changes. The key is to make them carefully.
Most
minor changes will not effect your placement all that much . .
. if any. But major changes as well as a minor change to an
important part of the website can. What type of things can
change on your website?
- adding content (new pages; adding products; etc)
- removing outdated content
- Changing content (rewording text; updating pricing;
etc.)
- publishing blog posts
- layout design changes
- Incoming link changes - technically these happen on
other people's websites but you may find that you have had a
new link show up, an old link be removed, the referring
website may have disappeared or been penalized or identified
as a link farm. A lot of stuff could happen here.
Competitors
Changing There Website
Guess
what . . . your competitors make changes to their website to
keep up with you too!
They
want the same top placement that you do and there is only so
much room . . . so if they out shine your website you may find
your placement drops.
Algorithm
Changes
Don't
be surprised to learn about this one. All the search engines
are concerned about how they rank everyone's website.
There
product is information. If they are posting websites that are
inappropriate for the keyword search performed . . . there
customers will not be happy and go elsewhere.
This
means that they need to continue to find ways to accurately
index all websites and return results that meet the needs of
their customers.
They
will make changes for a couple of main reasons:
- To keep up with changes to how webistes present
information
- Prevent "black hat" marketers from exploiting weaknesses
in their algorithms
- To just plain do a better job of indexing the billions
of websites out there
As
much as we might like to think they don't make changes just to
drive us crazy.
To
complicate things just for a second, you may also see
temporary drops in your rankings as a result of server down
time. If the server is down or experiencing latency issues
when the search engine is attempting to crawl the website . .
. it will effect your ranking. You really don't have much
control over this one, other than of course dumping a hosting
provider that experiences large amounts of downtime.
As
you can now see, there really are reasons that your rankings
fluctuate. It isn't anything to fear . . . but you do want to
be concerned enough to take appropriate actions like keeping
your website up-to-date.
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Tip of the Month
Handling
Personal Information
Recently
I have had a number of people asking me about a variety of
issues related to how businesses should handle
customer's personal information.
Anytime
you are entrusted with personal information from your
customers there are responsibilities you should
not ignore. Most business owners re-assure
their customers that their information is safe with them. They
may even go to the next level by providing written
policies spelling out that their information will
not be given away or sold.
In
today's world of identity theft, spam and "junk" postal mail
it is a major concern to most people . . . and if it isn't,
it really should be!
This
leaves us with an awesome responsibility. As business owners
we should be developing policies and procedures that will
protect not only our customers, but us as well.
Here
are a few things to think about:
- Anytime you toss printed material with sensitive or
personal information on it; shred it. There are people
in this world that will "dumpster dive" for this type of
information. Once anything is in the garbage . . . it
is fair game (legally speaking).
- The same goes for electronic media; if you are tossing
cds or
such . . . make sure you physically destroy the
media so no one can retrieve the data. There are
professional service providers that will wipe harddrives so
no data can be recovered. Simply deleting data does not make
it un-recoverable.
- Think twice about giving away your contact or
distribution lists for phone, mail or email. There are
legitimate reasons to hand a list like this over . . . such
as to a marketing firm doing some work for you. But make
sure it is clearly understood that they can only use the
list for your project. You must trust them explicitly . . .
once it is out of your hands, you no longer have control. If
someone asks for a copy of your distribution list . . . look
for a way to accomplish your goals without relinquishing
control.
As
far has how to properly handle personal information for
marketing you should be aware of things like:
Be
responsible and you will earn the respect of your clients.
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Success Stories
I
recently had the pleasure to set up a client with our Email
Campaign Management system.
They
were concerned about how to contact their customer base
on a regular basis in a way that was both effective and
economical and would allow them to track their efforts.
The
solution was to use our E-mail Campaign Management system to
create and send interesting newsletters on a regular basis.
They are able to maintain their own contact list and create
multiple sub-lists specific to each product line they
manufacture!
They
can track their statistics to monitor things like:
- Successful Delivery
- Bounce Rates
- Open Rates
- Click Through Rates (did anyone click on links in the
newsletter)
The
best part of the whole system seems to be just how easy it is
for them to use. The person responsible for creating the
newsletters and sending them out is a bit of a novice when it
comes to computers.
They
have found an economical and easy way to keep in contact with
their customers!
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