By Dawn Rowlett
Search Engine Positioning Specialist

Monitor Your Ranking Reports
A list of all of your important keyword phrases should be made before or right after your submissions.

All of your keywords should be checked in the major search engines shortly before or immediately following submissions, noting the position of each word in each engine. Normally, it is only important to check the first 30-50 positions. Any rankings below this will probably never be seen by a searcher anyway.

Your position for these keywords should be checked regularly (at least one time per month). Remember to always keep note of the position for each of your words for each engine.

Over the course of the next 16 weeks or so, you should see a gradual or rapid increase for the placement of your keywords throughout the major engines. Some positions may fluctuate in an upward or downward slope.

Occasional decreases are completely normal. To achieve desired results, you should see more positions increasing than decreasing.

Tweaking Your Search Engine Positions
You should not make any changes to your web site or to your optimization procedures until at least 3 months after you have submitted your web site.

If you do not see desired results in your search engine rankings after 3 months, make sure that you have a minimum of 10-20 quality, incoming links to your web site from other sites.

Look around at the web sites that you are competing with. What do they have that you don't?

Make sure that you are following all search engine criteria and that you are not using any spam techniques at all.

Consider tweaking your optimization efforts by securing more incoming links to your web site, analyzing your sites size, navigation structure and keyword placement.

Tracking Your Traffic & Sales
As your search engine positions are increasing, so should your traffic.

Your web design, hosting or optimization company should be able to provide you with a good tracking system to monitor the traffic coming to your web site.

Keep a close eye on how many visitors you are receiving, where they are coming from, how many pages they are viewing, how long they are staying and the pages that they leave on.

Tweaking Your Keyword Choices
If you have high search engine positions for a number of your important keyword phrases but you are not receiving any traffic from those phrases, evaluate the keywords that you have used.

#1 rankings for keywords that no one will search for, will not increase your traffic.

If you have not already researched your keywords, do so now. Choose phrases that are popular that people are searching for.

Tweaking Your Design & Layout
If you are getting a lot of traffic but not receiving a lot of sales, it is important to analyze the reason that people are leaving your web site.

Make sure that your site has fast loading pages, has a comfortable design, is easy to navigate and a simple, secure ordering process. Consult with your designer regarding tweaking that can be done to the design and layout of your web site to maximize the sites sales potential.