Sometimes, SEO Will Drive You Crazy

There is one certainty when it comes to search engine optimization, and that is quite simply that sometimes, SEO will drive you crazy.  I do not mean that type of crazy where you are imagining seeing things or hearing voices, but rather the kind of crazy that has you banging your head on your desk and asking questions out loud as you lie in bed late at night trying to figure out what went wrong.

SEO is a funny business, and things change constantly in ways that are hard to keep up with.  You can be doing poorly and do nothing, and suddenly you jump way up in the organic results.  You can be number one and working hard on a daily basis, and suddenly find yourself dropping without any understanding as to how it happened.  Sometimes it seems like you are working magic and are unstoppable, and other times you ponder whether you have any business working on search engine optimization projects at all.

I will give you a prime example.  One of our projects was ranking number one for it's top keywords, and of course we were looking to continue that trend across other keywords as well.  We were making a couple of tweaks with the H1 tags (page title) and even messing around a bit with meta data (which really should not have any type of effect).  I think we got rid of what was considered an irrelevant phrase and added one that we felt was certain to help our work.

The next day, after our page had been crawled, we suddenly experienced a drop, falling from number one to number two.  Of course, this set off a bit of a panic as we tried to figure out what we did and why it was happening, and even at this moment we still have not quite figured out the problem.  It could be the H1 shift, it could be some change elsewhere in the site, it might be that our competitors are doing something different, or it could just be that there was an algorithm shift.

For awhile, the thoughts just kept running round and round, and tempers were starting to flare.  It was at that point that we realized that we will might never know, and that we should focus on what we like best about white-hat SEO- working hard, doing the right things, and trying to achieve that number one position again.  So we are going to keep experimenting, try to figure things out, and have a little fun trying to figure out all the complexities of organic search.

The same should go for you if you experience a setback.  Do not beat yourself up, keep working hard, and strive to always stay positive.  Today's setback can lead to tomorrow's success if you let it.