Lost Rank What The Heck?

Professional SEO's, webmarketers or the inhouse do it yourselfer have all experienced a sudden drop in website ranking at some point in their carrier or website life. 

What Do You Do About Your Website Plumenting In Rank?  Well have a plan Stan! 

You just launched a couple of months ago and woo hoo, its bright up here at the top, now I'm no where to be seen and in the shadows of dispair.  This is a typical sceneiero in new site launches, the engines index them, you enjoy a temporary boost in rank only to find it gone.  There are annomolies that maintain their rank especially if they bought an older domain off of the resale market, or they are highly focused, low competition niches or lastly have a hughe budget and team of seo's, link builders and expert writters to provide a consistent growth in content. 

a. This is normal
b. Keep on a forward moving path, adding quality keyword topic related content on a reguar basis - that means shoot for once a day for the first couple of months.
c. Guest comment on related blogs, make sure to use your url in the comments  ie link building
d. You do use your FREE google webmaster tools right? 
e. Take advantage of building up your social profiles  across twitter, facebook, posterous, foursquare and also flckr (name your images with keywords please)
f.  Join Targeted communities, if you sell bike shorts, well you should not be spending your time and effort in the cooking forums - it's about focus

Established Sites:
If you have a backup contigency budget to implement a ppc or other paid traffic generation. Think of it as a rainy day fund.  Set asside a reasonable budget for a 60 day period of paid for inclusions,  ppc or cpa advertising. This will give you a generous amount of time to address what may be causing your sudden decline. 

What is reasonable? Well there are many tools on the market that help tell you what your "keywords are worth as well as what is the average spend on those words. Knowing what this is gives you an idea of your target rainy day fund. (check out google webmaster tools, or browser plug in seoquake )

Both Rainy day funded and no/low budgets

Have a "what the heck" reason finder method in place to discover why the sudden loss in ranking favor could put you back on the road to recovery.

a. Check to see if there has been any algorithm changes within the search engines you have been ranking in.
b. Back track any changes, seo or other wise that you have done to your website, including any new backlinks that look suspicious.
c. Of course you have been monitoring your competition, check out to see if your vertical in industry competitors have made, which also can change your ranking. 
d. Check your servers and your error logs. Maybe tech changes have created slow loading or errors on pages, these can cause rank plumeting especially if a site wide issue.
e. Be honest, have you gotten complacient in adding content, link building  of low/no quality?  Re-energize your site with some fresh content and get back on  a pro-active publishing schedule.
f.  Check your inbound links. When is the last time you proactivly adding high PR value inbound links to your interior content?
g. Mentioned above, check your webmaster tools and other Free search /webmaster tools many have evolved since the last time you were there.
h. Take advantage of some of the free PR release services, create a press release and submitt it.  Also if you dont have one add a News & Press Release Section on your site.
i.  Gust blog, or post off of a complementary to your industry website, make sure you get linked credit.
j.  Utilize your established relationships and your mailing lists, create a buzz worthy newsblast to your advocates.
k. Diversify your online exposure!!!!!!!!!!  Don't be dependent on any one source of traffic for a bulk of your business.  Start creating multiple channels that way blips in algorythems will just be a annoying misquito vs. having your wallet dissapear.

 

Lastly don't panic, be patient and take practical purposful steps to rebuilding rank

 

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