Congratulations, your website is at the top of the search engines and your
traffic is at record levels. Sales are up and your boss is grinning like a
Cheshire cat. No doubt, as the person in charge of marketing your website,
you have either spent hours researching great sites such as Search Engine
Guide or Search Engine Watch and have achieved the results yourself or, more
than likely, you have employed the services of a search engine marketing
company. Either way, you now proudly sit at the top of the search engine
results for the golden keywords you wanted.

Don't get complacent

So now that you are at the top of the search engines, you can sit back,
relax and enjoy months of great positioning, right? Wrong! The effort it
took to get your website top positioning is nothing compared to the effort
needed to keep it there. Now that you are on the top of the world looking
down, you need to make sure that you remain in great shape. Granted, some
search engines do not need the same type of effort to keep your website at
the top, but you are still looking at a full time job and a constant battle
to ensure that your website doesn't start slipping down to ranking oblivion

Changing face of search engines

Your first challenge is keeping up-to-date with the changing face of the
search engines. Search engines are relentless machines, constantly looking
for new enhancements and modifications to make to their results. Popular
search engines such as Google, AltaVista and Lycos are forever competing
against each other for the crown of "best search engine". Subscribe to
SearchEngineGuide.com's newsletter and you will repeatedly read news and
propaganda from different search engines claiming to have either the most
accurate algorithm or the highest number of visitors. It is this battle for
bragging rights that drives the search engines to improve their results and
keep ahead of the competition. With these changes happening on a more than
occasional basis, constant monitoring and tweaking of your website are vital
to ensure that your #1 position today, does not become a #30 position
tomorrow.

Your competition wants revenge

If your website has managed to obtain top position on the search engines,
you can bet that you have dethroned one of your competitors to get there. Do
you think they will sit back and be happy with their lower positioning and
less traffic? Of course not. The very reason you wanted to move up from
obscurity is the same reason that your competition is not going to be happy
with their site dropping down the rankings. Consequently, they are likely to
be hurting, both emotionally and financially. They are going to want their
#1 position back and quickly. Therefore, you can bet your life that they are
going to be coming at you with a vengeance. More than likely, they will
curse themselves for getting complacent and seek professional assistance to
find out why they dropped down the rankings and how it can be fixed. Pretty
quickly, they will have either hired their own search engine consultant or
read every search engine resource they can find in an effort to get back
their top search engine position. Either way, they are going to be working
hard to ensure that the coveted #1 spot they once held is again in their
possession.

With the proliferation of articles and reports on the importance of search
engine marketing, it is easy to be lulled into a false sense of security.
Most of the advice that I see and hear seems to concentrate on techniques
and tips to achieve top search engine positioning. In fact, a lot of search
engine marketing companies only make a one-time fee to achieve initial
positioning and fail to offer any type of maintenance service. Hopefully
now, more people will recognize that, while it is important to obtain top
search engine positioning, it is just as important to ensure your website
stays there. Without constant supervision, any top rankings are open to
being lost.

About the Author
Andy Beal is Vice President of Marketing for Keyword Ranking, specialists
in search engine marketing. Highly respected as a source of search engine
optimization advice, Andy has had articles published around the world. Under
his guidance, Keyword Ranking has grown to become one of the larger and more
successful search engine marketing companies. They were one of the first
companies to offer guaranteed levels of success using spam-free methods.
andy@keywordranking.com