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Here is a list of 10 things you should do to ensure successful search engine rankings.

1. Did you do in depth research to find the most targeted key phrases to optimize for?
2. Do you have unique titles and descriptions on each page?
3. Do you have at least 150 words of unique original content on every page of the site?
4. Are the key phrases you want to rank for embedded naturally into the content of your pages?
5. Do you have a sitemap that links to every page on the site? Is there a link to the sitemap page on the home page?
6. Are you adding at least 1-2 new pages of content each week?
7. Are you getting at least 5 new links each week?
8. Is the anchor text of your new links the key phrases that you want to rank for?
9. Are you pointing some of your links to internal pages of your site?
10. Are you spending time each week checking out resources to learn more about SEO?

One of the most common worries I have seen with website owners over the last 5 years is when their website vanishes from Google for some of the terms they were ranking for. This especially happens to websites that are newer.

Why does this happen? Have I been penalized? Will my site ever come back? These are the questions I get all the time.

Why does this happen?
I have no idea why Google will remove a website from their rankings without warning. All I can tell you is that it is something they do and you just need to accept it. It is their search engine and they can do what they want to. The good news is it happens to almost everyone at some point.

Has my website been penalized?
I love it when people ask me this. I always respond, have you done something to get yourself penalized? Contrary to public opinion, Google is not out to get anyone. They simply have one goal in mind for their search engine; To provide the most relevant search results to their users. This involves constant updates and changes to their algorithm which in turn means some websites at some time or another will disappear from the search results.

Will my site ever come back?
The good news about disappearing from Google is that 99.9% of the time your website will be back in the search results (many times much higher) within a week or two. I know it sucks when your site vanishes but when you were #24 and then the site is gone and 2 weeks shows up at #7 there really is no problem. No one would have found your site at #24 anyway. BE PATIENT with Google, it is out of your control.

Keep in mind that Google uses multiple data centers and many of those datacenters show different results. So that means you can do a search for a term you want to rank for and see you are on page 1 and then 5 minutes later do the same search and get a different datacenter and see your site on page 2 or 3. There was no penalty, your rankings didn’t drop, you just happened upon a datacenter that ranks your website differently. That is just how Google does it.

As you probably know if you have read any of my posts before, I am deep in the SEO world having been an SEO specialist for over 5 years now. Well I have been watching closely the Google rankings for certain terms that I want Prosperly to rank for.

We launched the site in mid-July and over the weekend finally had a breakthrough. I noticed that we rank for two of the main terms I am targeting.

Make money online – #24
Start an internet business – #24

I do find it interesting that both of the terms are at #24. I wonder if the placement is almost like a holding place for the terms until Google can decide where to put Prosperly in the search results.

Either way I am very pleased that we are on the map, it took about a month and a half to get there. Those 45 days consisted of a lot of content editing and link building for the site.

So those of you who have recently started an internet business and want to make money online, use this as a good gauge as to when you will start seeing results if you do things the right way.

Keep in mind however that being #24 or on page 3 of search results isn’t going to bring traffic. But we’re on the Google map now and as I employ sound SEO practices we will continue to move up, and the same will happen with your website.

Recently I posted about how I had completely redesigned Clearvieweducation.com. We took it from a static site that had about 60 html pages and moved to WordPress where the site is dynamic and will have thousands of indexed pages. I knew that in order to compete with the big dogs like elearners.com I would have to make the switch.

I was most concerned about losing the solid Google rankings the site had achieved, for example it ranked in the top 10 of Google for “online college degree”, “accredited online colleges”, “online accredited colleges”, “top online business schools” and many more. We set up 301 redirects to tell Google that all of the old pages had changed to new pages and then waited hoping for the best.

Setting up the 301 redirects was the most important part because we had changed all of the file names/urls of every page of the website, including the home page. When Google or any search engine tries to access an old page the 301 tells them that the page has permanently moved to a new page and redirects them to the new page. (Here is a good tutorial on 301 redirects)

So we got the new design all ready and then we set up our .htaccess page with all of the 301′s. We added both the site and the .htaccess page to the live server and the new site was live. I started immediately doing link building getting links pointing to the new pages of the site and hoped for the best.

IMPORTANT: The one thing we didn’t change was the domain. If you have to change your domain name I don’t know that there is a way you can do it without losing rankings.

Well it has been about 3 weeks and we haven’t seen much of a drop off if at all in the rankings. If anything we have seen a traffic increase. The site is #5 on Google for “online college degree” and for “online accredited colleges”. Most of our other rankings have stayed the same or improved as well which has caused a consistent increase in traffic to the site. The big term “online degree” which was at about #40 is up to #25. If I get that to page one of Google, look out!

We finally finished and launched the new Clearview Education website. Before I was dealing with a static template website I purchased 2 years ago and had a very hard time customizing. We have now switched to run through WordPress and the site is both dynamic and scalable. This is the same website some offered me $32,160 for the old piece of junk. This new website will make this site 100 times more valuable.

Why is it that much better you ask?
Well having a dynamic website (information is called from a database instead of on the actual html page) allows you to have thousands of relationships between information in the site which creates thousands of pages. The bigger a website looks to a search engine the more authoritative it looks. In other words, with these changes I plan on taking this site from making about $2k a month to making about $2.5k a day.

I’m a little worried because of all of the 301 redirects we had to do and I don’t want to lose any of the search engine rankings (currently #4 for “online college degree” on Google) but I know that over long term it will be beneficial. This will allow the website to rank for thousands of long tail search terms as well as rank even higher for the big terms.

Here is a snapshot of the old website:

Here is a snapshot of the new website that we literally launched 30 minutes ago:

Let me know what you think of the new site. We spent a couple of months getting this thing ready and we are really excited about the possibilities. I mean who wouldn’t be excited about making $75k a month from one website right?