Wanting to get your site ranked higher is a normal, rational goal. You find who is above you, find out how they are put together, do one better and rise up. There are times that I have had to compose myself and not fly off the handle. There are things that happen that are more of a damage to pride issue rather than a loss of business issue. There are some signs that you need to start taking your SEO very seriously and figure out what is going on and a plan to fix it.

1. Your site drops below the fold on the 1st page.

If you are climbing your way to the first page, you are on your way. That’s fine. An SEO campaign takes time. The problem is when you start to lose your footing. Trading off the first and second positions is normal for many sites. If you drop further and even below the fold, you need to pay attention to what it going on. If you research a little, you’ll find a lot of people who like to vent. Look at the sites that are outranking you. Check how many sites link to you and how many link to your competitors. A quick way to check is to use the link: operator in google - link: www.mysite.com Try to gain as much of an understanding of why some one’s  site is preferred over yours.

2. Your time on site drops

Depending on what you have as far as content on your site, your measurement of people’s time on your site will be different. If you’ve been enjoying a two minutes and 30 seconds average time for your site and your site suddenly drops to 30 seconds, you have an issue to address quickly. Are you keywords no longer relevant? Are people being misled by your content? Have you updated your site in awhile?

3. Your conversions drop below 1%

Conversion rates are fun to compare and brag about and argue over. The conversion rates of direct mail pieces are considered good if you achieve 1%. I think online SEO conversion rates should aim for 5-8%. Your website should always consider the types of customers you have and create strong calls to action. If your conversions drop in proportion to your unique visitors, you need to see how people are using your site. The mindset has changed, the offer is not compelling anymore, the language is not answering their need, you are not presented as a solution provider.

4. Negative Reviews Increase … Quickly

There are negative people out there. It’s also easier to write a bad review than a good one. Your SEO efforts will bring this negative review to everyone. Your online reputation management needs someone work. You may need to take some time and review the procedures in your company. If you have a good BBB rating, put that on your website near the top. The BBB rating that links to your profile is more powerful than an anonymous review from Redbaron69.

1. You shouldn’t develop a site in Flash. 1998 was an awesome time of promise for Flash being the new Internet standard. Once it was discovered that the search bots couldn’t read flash sites, it didn’t take despite the rantings of my graphic design friends.

2. Flash can be weighty.Desigining an ad in flash doesn’t take many kilobytes, but start putting in more and more functionality, like a game, and it starts tack on more KBs than you want.

3. Flash is popular.There are several sites that host fun little flash games that can keep you busy for hours. Even the mighty Farmtown is in Flash. Flash-built tools and trinkets have made Flash very ubiquitous. It will be very hard to dislodge out of the common internet surfer.

With these three truths, you can see that you could put something useful on your site built in flash. A nice calculator, game or tool that can make your site note-worthy.

or should you?

Apple has been bold in its stance on not allowing Flash on iPhones or iPads, the future(?) of computing. There are good points to abandon Flash, but there are reasons to keep it. (If Farmville suddenly couldn’t be accessed by millions, there would be blood.)

I had trouble in which way to lean on this issue. There are several plans for flash objects to be included in my web properties, but if Apple was going to grab a hold of the market, I didn’t want to waste an investment in an abandoned technology (remember betamax?). With the antitrust probe possibility, it didn’t clear up my decision.

Today, however, I was running some reports in Google Analytics and I noticed a report that I passed over before or that I didn’t see.

Under “Visitors” you’ll see a “Mobile” category that you can expand. If you expand it you’ll see “Mobile Devices” and “Mobile Carriers.”

For my main site, I had 8 times more visits from the iPhone than the Android. I already had iPad hits, which I didn’t expect to see for awhile. (I aim low and pessimistically with my SEO work, it makes me feel better when I exceed a goal.)

For my local area, the Apple iPhone is clearly the winner. This means that if I put a neat little flash object on there, only 1 out of 8 mobile users would have seen it.

Is it time to abandon Flash?

Well, no, for two reasons:

1. The possible antitrust probe – This could force Apple to open up to 3rd Party developers like Adobe and

2. Android is outselling the iPhone right now - At this point, more phones that can support Flash are entering the market.

For your website development and SEO campaigns, keep track of your visitors trending concerning mobile devices. It is definitely worth while to include this information periodically in your plans to develop flash objects.

If you have a website already, you may not be the one updating it and making changes to it. And that’s OK! Really! You have a business to run and the website is just a part of your business marketing. You may have another company or a freelancer looking over your site and it’s important to bring them in on what you want to accomplish with your site.  You want to grab a hold of this “Internet marketing” quickly, but where do you start?

First, ask your webdesigner if they know of any “methods to bring more leads to the website.” Don’t start throwing around acronyms like SEO, SEM or PPC because people may have different definitions of what these are in initial conversations and what they entail. Just begin by talking about leads. If they aren’t interested in helping in that, it’s probably time to ask for the keys to the admin side of your website and look for someone else who is interested.

Being a former freelancer and having worked with several web companies, below is a list of personalities I have come across when the subject of SEO comes into play. I want to suggest some methods on how to get the momentum going and continue with each of these personalities.  Your experience may vary.

Note: I tried to find some sources for how to communicate properly with your webmaster, but most articles are for webmasters dealing with clients.  Times are changing as SMB owners are going to the net looking for advice and so we may see more topics on the subject.

Personality #1: The Controller

This personality seems to portray that every suggestion or update is a huge problem. There might be reasons for this. Are your suggestions presented in a constant stream with little or no end in sight? It’s important to define the goal of your site and have every update go toward that goal. Remember that not every new bell and whistle available on the Internet will benefit your business – it will most likely distract you from your overall purpose.  Bring them into the conversation of how to increase leads to your site and what they think might be the right Internet strategy for your website.  Remember, you’re trying to develop a communicative relationship.

Personality #2: The Artist

This personality is more concerned with the look and feel of the website. More than likely, they designed your site in 95% Flash. The web artist is in a vulnerable spot since their portfolio usually consists of web links that include your site as one of their clients. When approaching the world of “increasing web leads,” a garish spam-looking site might enter their mind and their portfolio loses a page.  It will help when you point out that their success in making a website that generates leads while designing a pleasing look will increase exponentially. To those that refuse to change any design to include SEO I say “if a website can’t be found in searches, does it really exist?”

Personality #3: The MIA

This personality is one who is hard to pin down because they seem to be always ”missing in action.” Emails are brief and not fully answered. Their voicemail greeting seems to be the only time you hear their voice. Besides providing poor customer service, the MIA is inadvertently holding your website hostage. No, that doesn’t mean you go in guns a-blazin’. Hostage negotiation is more appropriate. Bring the MIA in on more agreeable ground. Respect. Contract Extending Respect. Bring them into your confidence on what your goal is “to generate more leads.” Leave it open to see how they can be a part of it. Have them show you access to the admin part of your site. If they don’t seem to want to go along with you on the journey, ask them for your administration access and give it to someone else.

Who do you give it to?

Why, a reputable  internet marketing firm of course! SEO companies not only have Search and Social Marketing techniques in mind for your industry, they also have graphic designers to make your site pleasing to look at and smooth to use.

Remember that your website is an invaluable tool for your business.  The person who controls your website is not an enemy but a great resource, no matter their personality.  Remember to cultivate communication and ask for education on what they know either in design or Internet technology necessary for your business.

Page Titles

If you don’t know how page titles play into users or search, that’s okay. Many small to medium business owners don’t know how to exactly use them or how they can be effective. Think of the page title as your first chance to explain to the user what is on the page. It’s not only found on the top of the browser window, but it’s also the heading in your result in a search engine. Adding in hierarchical page titles can be a very quick fix for your site, depending on its size, if you don’t have them or have just your site’s name for each page. Of the few things that Google does recommend to us, correct page titles is one of them.

Flash Navigation and Footer Links

Flash navigation is something small business owners would like on their site, so when a design firm dangles that carrot, it’s hard to resist. If you can’t resist, make sure you also request they include static navigation in the footer. Flash navigation can give some users trouble (even more depending on what you’re selling and the demographic of customers it draws), as well as block search engines. Now you might say that you read somewhere that Google is indexing Flash, but is it worth the risk to not include the static navigation? Didn’t think so. You’re better off with it; it won’t cost that much to implement and changes the feel of the page very little from the user’s point of view.

Header Tags

I came across a site the other day that wasn’t utilizing header tags properly. In fact, they weren’t using header tags at all. This struck me as odd and reminded me that, at this stage of web progress and development, not all websites are created equal. Additionally, they weren’t all created or updated at the same time. Using header tags correctly not only organizes your content on each page, but also boosts the relevancy of that page in the eyes of the search engines. Header tags are relatively inexpensive to implement and should be on everyone’s to-do list if they haven’t done them already. Carrie gives a quick how-to in Step 3 of her post On-Page Keyword Optimization.

If you’re thinking of investments to make this coming year or even want to squeeze in some upgrades before the end of the year (great for taxes), keep in mind these simple adjustments that could also be your first steps in SEO.

SEO is, by nature, competition.  Ranking higher than the other guy is the purpose of SEO because people don’t have time or interest to visit every single page that comes up for a certain keyword.  I read a forum that said the word “spam” can stand for “Sites Placed Above Mine.”  The war continues with Black Hat SEOs pointing and laughing at White Hats, while White Hats frustrate them with upgrading algorithms and actually providing quality content and service.

It’s all competition.

Luckily, you don’t have to take on the entire community of SEO experts, you just have to worry about your keyword family.  Researching keywords and search behavior of your potential customers is a large and should be the biggest part of SEO.  You want to define your service or product into words that the customer will type into a search engine.  Sadly, the competition is so fierce that it can’t stop there.

Fortunately, SEO efforts of your competition can be partially viewed and analyzed.  Knowing your main competition and what they are doing will help you see what you need to do better.

1. Write Down Your Main Keywords and Phrases
These will serve as a guide for all your SEO efforts.  If you still are stuck at this part, then take 5 minutes and go here.

2. Enter Those into Google, Yahoo! and Live
The top three search engines have the most market share together.

3. Take Note of the Top 3 Places
Do this once a week to gauge any movement.  If you specialize in local search, take note of all 10 of the movement of the Google Map results.  Movement of certain names up the list should be flagged for interest.

Lets say after a few weeks of tallying, you notice that there is one other site that seems to your main competitor.  There could be several, but you should concern yourself with the top three.  After you have your “enemy” in your sites, it is time to start some basic analysis.

4. Note How They are Using Their Title Bar and H1 Tags
This will show you if there is some low hanging fruit to pick off and add to your site.  If your competitor has “Welcome to Competitor.com” or “Home,” you are free to giggle only if you have put your keywords in your own title bar.

5. Note Who is Linking to Them by Typing “link:competitor.com -competitor.com” in Google
This is a quick way to see how many sites are linking to them.  The “-competitor.com” part takes out any internal linking in the results.  For a comprehensive look, also hop on over to Yahoo! and enter “linkdomain:competitor.com -competitor.com”.

6. Setup Google Alerts With Their Name and URL to Keep on Top of Any Activity
A comprehensive alert will keep email you any news story or blog or anything else that might have been “crawled” by a bot.  Press Releases and Reviews of your competitors can be sent to your inbox.

Doing these basic steps will give you more knowledge on how to pursue your own SEO efforts. If you are feeling particularly blood-thirsty, I recommend reading this.

Remember, it’s all fun and games until someone is knocked down in rank.