Dealing with updates and site changes

One last problem you may encounter after you’ve initially set up your SEO strategies is the updates and changes that your site will go through. Often, people feel that once the SEO is in place, then it’s always in place, and they don’t have to think about it again. But believing this can lead to a very unpleasant surprise.
When your site changes, especially if there are content updates or changes to the site structure, links can be broken, tags may be changed, and any number of other small details may be overlooked.
When this happens, the result can be a reduced ranking for your site. Site crawlers look at everything, from your tags to your links, and based on what they see, your ranking could fluctuate from day to day. If what the crawler sees indications that your site has changed in a negative way, the site’s ranking will be negatively affected.
Many things affect the way your site ranks in a search engine. You’ve seen an overview of a lot of them in this chapter, and you’ll see them all again in more depth in future chapters. Realize that SEO is not a simple undertaking. It is a complex, time-consuming strategy for improving your business. And without attention to all of the details, you could just be wasting your time. So plan to invest the time needed to ensure that your search engine optimization efforts aren’t wasted

Beware of content thieves

Maintenance of your SEO strategies is also essential in helping you find problems that might be completely unrelated to SEO. For example, SEO strategies can help you locate content thieves. One such strategy is tagging your web site. Some people (including black-hat SEOs) take snippets of content from your site to use on their own. If you tag your content properly, you can use some very distinctive tags, which will help you quickly locate content that has been stolen.
Another way in which SEO helps you to locate stolen content is through tracking. Presumably, if you’re executing SEO strategies, you’re monitoring your site metrics with a program like Google Analytics. Watching the metrics used by one of those analytics programs can help you locate content thieves. For example, if you look at your incoming links on one of these programs, you might find that people are coming to your site from a completely unexpected location. If that’s the case you can follow the link back to that site to find out why. A site using stolen content is easy to find using this method. There are also many services available that will help you track your web-site content.
Tagging works well for finding content thieves, and there’s another tactic you can use to thwart automatic content scrapers — domain cloaking. This is a process by which your web site appears to be located somewhere other than where it is. This is accomplished using an HTML frame set that redirects traffic from one URL to another. For example, if your web site address is www.you.somewhere.com, you can use domain cloaking to have your site appear to be www.yourbusiness.com.
The problem with using domain cloaking is that it can confuse a search engine crawler, because the same content appears to be on two pages, although it’s only one page and one that redirects. And another problem is that some search engine crawlers can’t read the frame set that’s used to redirect the user, which means your site may end up not being ranked at all. This is a tactic that should only be used in special cases where content is truly unique and could possibly affect your SEO rankings (or that of someone who might steal it) in a dramatic way.

After Your Site Is Built

Building the right site to help maximize your SEO efforts is a difficult task. And when you’re finished, the work doesn’t end. SEO is an ongoing strategy, not a technology that you can implement and forget. Time needs to be spent reviewing your practices, examining results, and making adjustments where necessary. If this ongoing maintenance is ignored, your SEO efforts to this point will quickly become time that would have been better spent standing out on the street with a sign around your neck advertising your web site. That might be more effective than outdated SEO.