If you have been running and updating your website consistently for a couple of years, it’s likely that you’ve secured some reasonable traffic from the search engines and obtained a decent Google page rank.

An important thing to remember is that just because you’ve got traffic, it doesn’t mean that it will increase or even continue. There are various factors that can happen that can cause your site to fall or drop out completely of the search engine rankings.

So what should you do in order to maintain or improve your search engine rankings? Some legitimate sites are being mistaken as spam sites by searchbots so care needs to be taken to avoid this. Below are a couple of good simple tips.

1) Be careful who you link your website to.

While backlinking is one of the most important things in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO), you need to be careful who you are linking to. If you link to sites that are considered spam sites bad neighborhoods, you are likely see a drop in your search engine results/positions.

This is because the search engines searchbots assume that you are linking just to increase your search engine ranking (which may be true, but they need to at least appear as useful and relevant links). Avoid linking to sites and pages that are mostly a list of links. Many of these sites are clearly spammy and also link to many other questionable sites.

If you want to put your link in a link directory, go for high quality link directories with Google page ranks of at least 2, especially if these directories require a reciprocal link back to their site. Personally I object to paying for links but some consider it worthwhile because they believe attached a cost to a link filters out most of the spammers.

The penalty attributed to linking to dodgy sites can be severe so be selective. If you aren’t sure about a site, you can check it out by using online tools that tell you if your website is linking to a bad neighborhood, such as http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

2) Make sure your keyword density isn’t too high

Your keyword density is an important factor that affects your search engine ranking positions. Search engines determine the relevance of your website to a particular subject by the use of keywords and phrases in your web page text. The higher the density of the keyword, the more relevant the web page for that keyword subject. However, if the keyword density is too high, it can work against you and the search engine searchbots will deem that you trying to spam the search engines and will penalise your site for keyword spamming or keyword stuffing.

Use of content with a conversational tone can produce premium keyword density and leave you with good quality content. A rough rule to follow is that your keyword should never appear in more than half of the sentences on the page. A better approach is to have your keyword not appear in more than a third of your sentences. However, you should also use synonyms and other related keywords or phrases within the pages, to add relevance. (Others may search using other keywords that are close or similar to the keywords you have selected as important). Essentially, I would not recommend a keyword density above 3%. Site like http://www.keyworddensity.com can be useful for checking keyword density.

There are many simple things you can do to ensure your site is assessed to be legitimate and most are common sense. The above two examples are two of the easiest and quickest to protect, maintain or improve your search engine positions. Keep visiting the Gatorweb Blog for more search engine optimisation and SEO tips

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