what changed in SEO? i am no longer near the top of the search engine and now i see other sites less relevant.

Question

I understand that search engines change their algorithm's to keep people honest and it normally shuffles the results around but i have seen some very drastic changes lately. Where can we go to stay on top of Yahoo! and their ever changing algorithm's? I now see more sites that are less relevant towards the top of Yahoo! especially ones that don't put any effort into their site, compared to the few of us that have put a lot of time, money, and energy in our sites to make our customers happy.

Answer 1

You cannot be sure what effort people put into site by looking at it. I find many people have no real understanding of SEO. People like me work 12 hours a day doing SEO and keeping track of changes and tuning into resources to learn what is going on and what may happen.

It is hard to say what you are or not doing that isn't working for you. Many people optimize a site and then never continue with building links, adding new pages and so on.

Answer 2

Not only do algorithms change, but so do the criteria for what gets a person in the top spots of google and yahoo. It is not enough to just perform SEO, as I have recently found out.

I hired a company to not only perform SEO for me, but to also perform some serious internet marketing for me. I am a stay-at-home mom with a home-based business, so it is imperative that my business covers all my expenses, but also, I needed a guy who could do this work for me on a very constrained budget.

I happened across an absolutely fantastic site that was in several top positions under various search terms in Google, Yahoo, and the other big ones, and I asked them who their designer was. They couldn't stop gushing about this guy, so I called him up and he has absolutely done a wonder for me.

http://www.ipowergrfx.com

He not only does fantabulous web design, he also is a marketing genius and is tops at SEO. His sites also don't have silly grammatical and spelling mistakes, everything is tight and shipshape.

The first thing I did is called him up to get some advice. He gave it freely. I asked him how much the conversation was going to cost me, as a consultant, and he told me nothing; the phone call was free.

I called him again a few weeks later and told him what I needed. He sent me a bid and promised that I would not pay a penny more than what was on the bid. I called up some of his clients and they all verified that his not-to-exceed bid was honest; that they had never paid a penny more than what was on his bid. That's not what I had found with my original designer, who by comparison, did a crap job on my site.

At least call the guy and see what he says; he can help you a lot.

Answer 3

Yes this can be a bit frustrating. But you should try to diversify your streams of traffic as much as possible. Just relying on organic traffic can be risky especially if you don't have many different streams of income.

Having said that, I think have the best content in the long run is the best approach. Also, you need a reason for people to come back to your site. Do you have an opt-in? Newsletter?

Try to have a long term approach and forget about the day-to-day changes to your yahoo or google rank. It can distract from your most important goal of creating compelling (fresh) content for your site.

Answer 4

Without being able to do any sort of serious analysis, I will venture to say that there maybe a problem with your links. The search engines are putting more and more effort on being able to identify "quality" links while discounting (and sometimes penalizing) other types of links.

Here, then, are some general principles about links which may help you:

1) Get links from sites whose content relates to and/or compliments the content and theme of your site.

2) Get links from sites which are popular and/or authoritative

3) Get links from a wide variety of sites.

4) Try and work your links into the content of sites which link to you.

5) Do not involve yourself in any sort of linking scams, no matter how "legitimate" you try to make them look. For instance, link exchange programs or link communities.

The basic rule of thumb is that you want your links to look as natural as possible, to come from as wide a variety of sources as possible and to be from sites which are related to and/or compliment yours.

If you want more information, you can check out the Link Building Tutorials at SEMBasics.com (www.sembasics.com). The first tutorial in the series can be reached here: http://www.sembasics.com/sem-blog/link-basics

Of course, there maybe another reason for your problem. As such, it may be worth while to check out some of the other tutorials at SEMBasics.com -- they can be reached here: http://www.sembasics.com/sem-blog/search-engine-optimization-tutorials

Best of luck!

Answer 5

I have downloaded some free trial SEO software, just a few days ago, so have not used it yet! But, I'm really learing alot for the free software. If they put this into an ebook, I'm sure they could sell quite a few copies!

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Answer 6

Here is a resource for you. I found the blog to be pretty helpful.

http://www.seo-web-consulting.com/