Now that my sites have been SEO'd for copy and structure, and all are getting good organic results .... How do I ensure my organic results do not slip over the next 4-12 months ?

I know I have to constantly review and change content and link up with credible link partners..... but what else?

Any info is appreciated !

Kahunamax

but what else?
give people a reason to want to link at your site without you needing to ask for the links. if possible.

This is appropriate for some but maybe not all sites:
Build a forum. It can take a year or more to get the community going but when it does you will have a lot of people creating content and more word of mouth for you.

Anybody that has a question about the product, needs support, question about how to do something can work in a forum area. If it's related to a hobby you can set up a forum for that. Like, if you're selling sewing patterns, you can set up a sewing forum with a sub-forum for knitting, etc.

A forum is a way to grow the website by adding a community aspect to it.

I know I have to constantly review and change content...

My emphasis in the above, as it's the second time I've heard this idea mentioned in as many days, and, IMO, it's not exactly true. If you change content on a page, as a friend yesterday was telling me he did, you're liable to confuse the engines as to what your page is about.

The idea came about because of observations that Googlebot would return to spider pages that changed often, news pages and the like. This does not necessarily correlate with increased rankings on a phrase. Yes, it's probably a good idea not to let your pages get stale, and to send out signals that your site is active. But constantly making changes to a page's content isn't the way to improve the rankings for that page.

What you really want to do is to add content (good enough that it's worth linking to) to a site in the form of new pages that relate to your other pages. This adds new content for users, attracts inbound links, and provides a broader range of targets for the search engine indexes.

My emphasis in the above, as it's the second time I've heard this idea mentioned in as many days, and, IMO, it's not exactly true. If you change content on a page, as a friend yesterday was telling me he did, you're liable to confuse the engines as to what your page is about.
yeah...Robert is right on the ball with that...the people who tweak content arbitrarily end up wasting time they could be spending on creating additional content.

Robert's right. I've got pages older than Mike Mackin that are still doing very well. You can do things to add timely seasoning rather than outright changes, but even that makes me nervous.

I'm older than Mike Mackin, and I'm still doing very well. That said, some of my sites are not still doing very well. But, as Robert has been so kind to point out, there has been precious little addition of content, which proves his thesis. Hmmm... Time to get to work on new, compelling, Pulitzer Prize worthy content. Think Google will respond well to that?

Time to get to work on new, compelling, Pulitzer Prize worthy content. Think Google will respond well to that?

Don't know about Google, but you might get a Pulitzer. ;)

Robert's right. I've got pages older than Mike Mackin.

Wow...Were talking pre PC days here, not just Internet years... ;)

Anyway, I always tell my clients to think about growing horizontally not vertically, many get so caught up on trying to get a few solitary keywords up and up when they should be thinking about growing traffic - not rankings. So much of their focus is on that one particular phrase that the CEO checks every morning when he wakes up it seems and bases your whole campaign results on the ranking of one phrase.

At my last In-house gig where I served as a Director of Search, for one property we had traffic from 312,000 different keyword phrases and we achieved that by bringing on additional channels and new vertical segments or categories and writing exclusive content around each channel. This was an increase of over 250,000 keyphrases by not focusing on rankings but on aquiring quality traffic.

Hi Joseph

Are you in need of work???

Let me know if you are....I think I found someone who understands!!!!!!

Clint

think about growing horizontally not vertically, many get so caught up on trying to get a few solitary keywords up and up when they should be thinking about growing traffic - not rankings. So much of their focus is on that one particular phrase that the CEO checks every morning when he wakes up it seems and bases your whole campaign results on the ranking of one phrase.
This is so true and happens way too often. In additional to what Joseph said, if you diversify the keywords you are targeting you are more likely to attract traffic that will convert at a higher rate. Too many online retailers obsess too much over their traffic and rankings. Traffic means nothing unless it converts into profitable sales.

Here is an example you may get 1,000 visitors a week for “MP3 Players”. Most of these people are just browsing around. They are at the beginning stages of the shopping process (or just teenagers obsessed with MP3 players). Now the person searching for “Rio Forge 512MB Sport” is at a much later stage in the process and will more likely convert (especially if your price is right).

As for content you may want to consider having a blog on your site. You can use it to answer customer questions, industry news, review new products/services or interview people in your industry.

At my last In-house gig where I served as a Director of Search, for one property we had traffic from 312,000 different keyword phrases and we achieved that by bringing on additional channels and new vertical segments or categories and writing exclusive content around each channel. This was an increase of over 250,000 keyphrases by not focusing on rankings but on aquiring quality traffic.

Could you tell me how you measured the amount of keyword terms you showed in the search engines for??

To run a ranking report on 500 phrases on 3 engines alone takes me hours so I would really be interested in how you were able to manage this.

Thank you

Clint

Could you tell me how you measured the amount of keyword terms you showed in the search engines for??

To run a ranking report on 500 phrases on 3 engines alone takes me hours so I would really be interested in how you were able to manage this.

Thank you

Clint

We used Omniture Analytics and using pixelized tracking we could run reporting on just about anything you could think of. I had actually consulted with Omniture to build in a button that would show the last page of keyphrase results so that I could use that final figure to chart organic growth but at the time I left that gig, they had still not implemented that feature. I had to manually keep entering a page number like 1500, 2000, 2500 etc. to get to the final page that would give me the total number of keyword variations. The process took me about half an hour. I would then track the growth of keyword phrases organically by month which is a metric that I have yet to see used anywhere.

When I started one particular campaign, we had traffic from 4,119 different keyphrase combinations. One year later I was able to create a graph that charted growth all the way to 84,024 different keywords. I think this, along with showing the number of pages indexed and of course overall converting traffic figures are much more effective than worrying about rankings.

I would get phone calls from SEO firms all the time telling me that they could get me higher rankings and right away I knew what level of expertise they were at - especially the ones that would tell me they could get me higher rankings for my top 20 keywords...well my top twenty keywords drove less than 2% of our traffic so that was of no use...so I would ask them how much their package would cost for a 300,000+ keyword program...there would always be a long pause at the other end.... :D

Its not about rankings, its about quality, converting traffic.

Added: I should mention - this was for a major ecommerce company that generates more than 50 Million page views a month.

Joseph

Thank you

Winning the traffic vs pretty rankings war is not easy...in fact its harder than getting the pretty rankings

Clint

I think maximum number of links pointing to your website will keep the listings on the ascending direction. Changing of content or renaming some existing pages might update GoogleBot and to come back to the new ones it will take some time.

HarRy