Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My client has several internal pages on his blog showing up on page one of Google searches for some pretty good keywords.
Some of the good SERP ranking are constant, while a couple of them would go up for a week and then drop into oblivion.
My question is, should we tweak those pages to make them more attractive to Google, so that they can stay on the front page? Or should we leave well enough alone?
By tweaking I mean adding more info and more useful links to the articles themselves. By making the pages more helpful, maybe Google users will stay at our page longer and signal to Google that we deserve to be on the front page of the SERP.
On the other hand, I'm afraid of messing up some magical keyword density that we achieved accidentally.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
The tweaking for the SE's part is more of a concern. If you start thinking in terms of what G or Y might want, rather than what your visitors find useful, you could start looking too SEO'd, and get caught in a filter.
By tweaking I mean adding more info and more useful links to the articles themselves. By making the pages more helpful, maybe Google users will stay at our page longer and signal to Google that we deserve to be on the front page of the SERP.
More info is always good. More outbound links, maybe, but not necessarily. As far as G knowing how much time visitors are spending on your site, I think that would only work if they have the G toolbar running (?).
I'm afraid of messing up some magical keyword density that we achieved accidentally.
You probably achieved it naturally, and by adding more content in an organic way, you should continue to do so. My advice would be to just look at the pages as though you were a visitor, present the best info you can, and forget about SEO tweaking.
One page once ranked 1st place for a really off-topic lyric from a song. I've no idea why. When I cleaned up the page and removed this phrase, I lost several hundred uniques a week.
I have also heard people saying that you should never 'tweak' a successful home page. But with a news / content site, that seems odd advice.
The only case where I've noticed that this has a negative effect is in removing words.
That is certainly a concern. On a related note, I'm afraid of my client rewriting the articles to make them much longer, thus maybe making the keywords that are ranking well be less prominent in the article.
But overall your advice is very good. I have to keep reminding myself that we design websites for people, not Google!
