Your competitors

If you are successful in reaching the top of the search engine rankings for your desired keywords or phrases there is a temptation to put all this work on the shelf and just give yourself, or whoever did it for you, a pat on the back.

Unfortunately you are only there because your website and your SEO are currently better than your competition and obviously they are not happy about that.

Business in business and there will always be someone out there who will now, or at some point, be planning how to take a number one position for an important keyword or phrase.

But there are some things you can do yourself that mean your position will be continually strengthened with little or no effort.

• Continue to provide valuable and original content so that more and more websites will link to you naturally over time. This could be by, for example, adding articles or a blog to your pages
• Provide a way for user to add content - perhaps by being able to review products that you sell. This way they are providing more text rich content and all you have to do is check it's not span
• Ensure your website is included in all offline advertising that you can afford - be that TV, radio, newspaper or local newsletter

But in the end how much SEO work you have to do will always depend on how much SEO work your competitors are doing.

To forum or not to forum

Undoubtedly one of the best ways to have lots of text, and original text, added to your website is to put a forum on it. However this can have disasterous and unexpected side effects:

• No one uses your forum so users think your website is unpopular
• Too many people use your forum and you spend all your time moderating it and removing spam entries leaving little resource for actually running your business

Forums also leave you in little control of what keywords will start to dominate the pages. If you sell bicycles but your forum becomes better known as a place to swap tips on repairs then your website will become better and better known for 'how to repair a bike' and less and less known for 'bicycles for sale'.

The upshot is that forums are not generally recommended for SEO unless your entire reason for being is to run a forum at your own expense.

Classified Ads

Really this is a similar situation to a forum and once again there is a great deal of administration to do here, often unpaid.

Novice SEO practitioners will be looking to add spam as adverts non stop and if genuine people don't want to use it then the pages will look ghostly for genuine users.

Adding a blog to a website

So much SEO advice says "yes" but they don't actually explain what adding a blog really means. You will need to:

• Write engaging and useful posts on a regular basis
• Write in good English (or whatever the language is

If the blog is not updated regularly users loose confidence in the website because they are unsure if all the other information is up to date. And the web is littered with abandoned blogs - often from those who just could not find the motivation to keep them going.