As I noted yesterday, this site came up on page 5 or a ranking of #41 for the keyword phrase Long Island SEO. I checked today and we’ve got a slightly better position of #39. This leads to the question of monitoring your SEO progress. While you might see changes on a daily basis, checking your rankings can be somewhat of an addiction and a source of agita. It’s not uncommon to see daily swings in both directions. For most, it’s perfectly fine to check your rankings on a weekly basis. Monthly reports are also ok. SEO, whether done on Long Island or nationally takes time and most importantly patience. If you plant seed, you cannot expect a full green lawn the following day. If you’re a sod type of person, then your only option is PPC (pay-per-click). Plant the seeds for organic search engine rankings and your patience will pay off. The grass is always greener for those who have good organic search engine rankings.

It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged on the site and it shows. Not only on the blog itself, but in my rankings. A quick search of Google finds Long Island SEO on page 5 or 41st overall for the keyword phrase Long Island SEO. That’s poor, but that provides us with challenge. Today I’ll start work on improving our position. Let’s set a lofty goal of making the 1st page of Google. I’d like to be first overall, but we’ll leave that for the next challenge. For now, let’s see if we can move Long Island SEO from page 5 where the tumbleweeds are present to page 1 where the real action happens. The first step in any good SEO campaign is on page content, so here we go.

The past week or so has been my first Google dance. A little over a week ago, activity started to pick up on forums such as Digital Point, Webmaster World and SEO Chat. Everyone was reacting to the bizarre results being served by Google. Google has a number of different datacenters. So, when they roll out a new update, they can test it on one server and then roll it out completely. Last week, SEO professionals were in a frenzy as a check of various datacenters were producing all types of odd results. Webmasters who were in the top 10 for a competitive phrase were completely dropped by Google. The SERP’s were dancing. While I haven’t seen the drastic amount of movement on my sites, I have noticed a 20% decrease in traffic. In a business where the goal is to increase traffic, losing 20% in a week is not very good. This has caused me to join the ranks and obsess over what might come of this latest Google update. The good news, if there is any, is that the latest update is schedule for three phases. With phase one out of the way, it’s expected that we’ll see one early this week and then hopefully a final roll out with occur. I stand among many who believe the initial phase is problematic. I say that not just as a concerned webmaster, but also from the Google side of things. The results being returned for certain queries are questionable at best. Let’s hope the next phase of the Google Dance produces better results for site owners and end users.