If you have a business on the internet, then you are well aware of how important it is to keep your search engine rankings for your best keywords. When your rankings drop, your sales drop immediatley. When your website gets dropped from the search engine results panic may set in. Life becomes frantic and you begin to picture your business coming to a screaching halt. You will certainly understand how scary it is to watch your website disappear in the SERP’s (search enine result pages) for the keyword phrase that brings you the most traffic.
That is the dilema I faced this past week and it was one I hope doesn’t happen again. It made me realize how totally reliant an Internet business is on search engines and unfortunately sometimes there is nothing you can do about it but wait and see if your good website ranking comes back.
To help you live through a traumatic experience like this, I have a few suggestions for you in keeping your website running smoothly.
- Review all the files on your site to see if there are any files that shouldn’t be there. Look carefully at the ones that raise any questions in your mind.
- Use Google webmaster tools. There is a tool there that you can use that will delete undesirable pages from their index. So any unwanted pages that are indexed by Google can be removed. I did that for a lot of pages that were reporting 404 errors because of what I had done to reorganize my blog pages.
- In Google webmaster tools there is a blog that you can post questions, complaints, etc. and read about what others have experienced. Many people have experienced the same problems you have had.
- Review the page in question that is not being included in Google’s index. Go through the page with a fine tooth comb and get rid of any unnecessary coding, make sure you are using your keyword phrase in all of your alt tags. Rename some of your photos with the name of your keyword phrase.
- You can always pay a SEO specialist to take a look at your site. Let them see if they can spot anything unusual.
Hopefully your website business won’t go through this, but because it is on the internet, it is vulnerable to that. Use these tips to help you keep your search engine rankings.
