Question from Bryce at Aeroplex/Aerolease (A great place to keep your airplane if you’re in the Long Beach area!)

Here’s the question:

All of our specific targeted keywords are still staying on the 1st page which is great. But..the more vague ones “hangar leases”, “hangar rentals”, “Long Beach Airport”, etc. are started to drop from pages 3,4,5 to 6,7,8. I make adjustments to the pages to optimize, but I either have to remove other keywords and it ends up dropping those words or it doesn’t really do much. Is this just naturally what happens sometime over time? Or is there something simple that I can do? In the big scheme of things its not a big deal as long as the specific targeted keywords still show up on the first page, but was just curious.

Here’s the answer:

Search engines give a little bit of extra credit to pages that they think are “current” rather than “stale.”  If you haven’t changed anything on your site recently, your rating may drop.

This is why we highly recommend blogs.  Every time you add a new page to your site or make some fairly substantial change, it causes the search engines to re-index your site and it will appear to be “new” again, improving your ranking for anywhere from a few days to several weeks, depending on the competition for the keywords you’re after.

We recommend writing a new blog post or some other simple material to your site once every week to stay at the top of the search engine rankings. The more the better, but adding or changing material even every month or two will help some.

Glad things are going well and your hangars are staying full of happy airplanes.

Another “trick” – when people ask you a question, ask if you can answer it on your blog. This does several things:

  1. More than one of your clients and constituents probably has the same question, so it’s helpful to publish it.
  2. Each entry provides new keywords for the search engines to process.
  3. Each entry makes your blog “current” again for several days or weeks (see above)

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