Your site ranks for your desired keyword phrases in Yahoo and Bing, but is nowhere to be found in Google. Why doesn’t Google like your site? Or maybe your site was ranking well in Google, but has suddenly plummeted.

Whether you are an SEO superstar, or just trying to get your site more exposure, it is important to realize that rankings are not static and will fluctuate. It’s a common mistake to get comfortable once you rank for your various keyword phrases. Once you achieve your ranking goals, remember you won’t stay there forever without hard work, and even then, you will experience ranking fluctuations.

First, don’t worry that your page was penalized unless you have done something deceptive. If you aren’t doing anything “fishy” with the search engines, you won’t have to worry about being penalized.  Most likely, if your page rank suddenly drops, it’s due to a major algorithm shift. Search engines are relentlessly fine-tuning algorithms, and new sites are continuously created. As a result, ranking fluctuations are normal.

Since this is the case, it is absolutely critical to optimize your website for many different related phrases. This will help when some phrases suddenly drop, as there will be others that perform well.  Never get stuck on one or two phrases. It’s awesome to rank well for some of the more coveted phrases. However, if they are that significant to you, you may want to also consider running PPC campaigns targeting your favorite keywords.

I recommend changing your focus from rankings to targeted traffic and conversion rates. Focus on making your site efficient at converting traffic into sales. With a high conversion rate and a well managed back-up PPC campaign, you won’t even notice a blip in your traffic or sales.

Google Loves Me, Google Loves Me Not is a post by SEO expert Starr Gelbhaar. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Utilizing the most sophisticated and in-depth SEO methods is absolutely useless if you aren’t using the right keywords. While this may seem obvious to those of us in the industry, I believe there are many who are still using the wrong words and failing at SEO attempts.

If you think like your consumer and select the words they are most likely to be searching (even if it’s not what you want to call your product or service), you will find achieve ranking success.

I had a client who offered psychic services. This particular client detested the term “psychic”, and wanted to use terms like, “Channeled Sessions.” This particular phrase doesn’t even report a single search incident. The closest term is “Channeling Sessions,” which reports a meager 28 searches for the past month, while terms like, “Psychic Reading”, “Psychic Phone Readings,” and “Spiritual Psychic Readings” are searched 165,000, 12,500, and 3,600 each month, respectively.

My client committed SEO suicide by refusing to adapt or modify her existing keywords and content, to reflect and support said keywords. The end result: her business failed. No one searched for her terms, and her site was never found. Why? Because she didn’t consider which keywords her target market would use. Instead of accepting suggestions that would have brought her traffic, she crippled all efforts put forth to make website optimization a success. She couldn’t get past her vision of how she wanted to label her services.

Let’s say you sell oranges. Only, you don’t like to call them oranges. You prefer to call the fruit ‘persnipples’. And let’s assume that you grow the best persnipples in the world. If you build a website using the keyword ‘persnipple’, no one will ever find you, and you’ll end up with sheds full of rotting fruit. Why? Because they were searching for ‘oranges’!

So, remember, consider your consumers’ standpoint when picking your keywords. Because after all, once you invest all the time, energy and money into building and promoting a site, you definitely want your consumers to be able to find you.

Selecting the Right Keywords to Capture your Target Market is a post by SEO expert Starr Gelbhaar. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.