Traffic drops 'do not always indicate a ranking issue'

10:09 10th June 2009

A search engine optimisation (SEO) professional has reminded firms that a decline in traffic does not always indicate a lower placement in search engines.

Vanessa Fox, an SEO expert, told WebProNews.com at the SMX Advanced show that many jump to this conclusion as soon as traffic starts to fall.

She said there might be an issue with crawling, with parts of the site being looked at but not others.

Alternatively, there could also be some form of extraction issue, Ms Fox commented.

Crawling efficiency was highlighted as an important issue because search engines might not crawl all the content on a website.

Consequently, it is important to cut out non-productive pages and error pages from a website in order to keep the engines focussed on the "good stuff".

The expert said companies need to set up infrastructure that will enable them to identify problems of this sort.

She asserted that it is important to be able to know the ranking a website has for its top queries.

Knowing the standings for key terms on search engine ranking pages will make it easier to identify any significant changes, Ms Fox claimed.

This comes after research from Forbes showed that search engine optimisation is one of the best ways to get conversions.