It is well known to all of us that you require to optimise your website (SEO) to get more traffic from the search engines.
Now let us consider a hypothetical situation. Suppose you have created a webpage and optimised it for keyphrase "SEO". Now you find that your url is placed somewhere around page-04 of the SERPs. So, the page requires further optimisation and you continue to do so untill and unless you are getting #1 position for that keyphrase.
Now my question is how frequently can we make changes in order to optimise the website for search engines. The question may appear somewhat confusing, but, as per as my knowledge goes, atleast Google dislikes frequent small changes in webpages. And in order to optimise a page for SEs, frequent small changes are inevitable. So, how frequently should we try it optimise it ?


Regards,
Sid

Really? I never knew that Google didn't like frequent small changes in websites. I always thought that they liked the websites they listed to be up to date. Or perhaps its because they have to recrawl the site and thus are annoyed?

And also, I wouldn't know if optimizing a website for search engines is really a small change, as sometimes this can be a pretty big change. I think that how often you decide to optimize your website really depends on the uses of your website. If it was a commercial site, it could cost a lot of money every time you optimize, and small changes that only make small differences on a search engine might not be efficient cost-wise. Thus, for that site you should probably only optimize when you're really dropping on a search engine list.

But you should also take into consideration that small changes will be efficient cost wise, and if you wait a long time between each optimization, it will be harder to change your website, making the changes cost more. For me, I would just change whenever my website begins to drop on a search engine list, and if not, I'd just leave it alone. No point wasting time and money for nothing.

This post has been edited by Arbitrary: Jul 7 2006, 06:23 PM

By "frequent small changes" I meant changes in Page Title, Description Meta Tags and may be some times changing text written in <H1> Tags like that. So far as cost is concerned, I do not think that it will cost too much. However, so far as SEO is concerned, these small changes are very effective ( atleast what I have found ). So I put forward that question. And indeed, if you pay too much attention to optimise your site for SEs, atleast Goolgle will not like that.
For obvious reasons Google loves to see pages whose contents are updated frequently as the visitors love to see latest fresh contents.

This would be the first time for me that I have heard that google doesn't like frequent small changes.

If you're signed up for google site maps, the google bot will decide how frequently to visit, and how frequently to reindex.

Most of my sites are visited byt he google bot daily. But are only reindexed weekly and in some cases monthly.

If I understand correctly, you're in position 4? And that's a problem? Or do you mean something different by -04?

Probably I failed to make a clear explanation of the phrase "Frequent small changes".

This actually means employing simple SEO tricks like changing page title, descriptions, text in <H1> tags and all without changing the actual content of a webpage. Say you have optimised your webpage for any ExampleKeyphrase, which should appear in the Page title, description and preferrably within <H1> tag in the body of that webpage and different other places. Now if your webpage is not listed in page 1 of Google SERP, you may consider making more adjustments to move up in the position.
Not quite sure whether you have tried/employed such tricks or not, but I know those are effective atleast to some extent.
You may check out this link for ON Page Negative SEO Factors

Instead of optimising your page, try to get more quality inbound links. try to get some good blogger to review your site or product and ask them to link to your site. Remember that a link in the content is more valuable than a link on the blogroll.
Regarding the keyword optimisation, you can try to write more content on that particular topic. If your site is a blog, try to write a blog series about the topic. For eg: your post may be about various operating systems, then you can write a blog series about the different OSs available. About 4-7 posts would do. Also try to publiscise your site in variious media like forum, chat, mail, friends, etc. Word of mouth will get more links from people.

I heard it some where also that it is not so good to frequently updating your web pages, and I believe it the reason is doing nothing ocnstructive on your website just working on optimising may flagged as over optimising.

But still it depends many other factors such as the size of your website in terms of the number of webpages, and percentage of the webpages being frequently updated. Also depend on the speed and volume of the contents newly added and inbound links your site gained.

If you are doing all above together your site will be regarded as "busy" website and it will even get promoted.

if speaking about google, then I guess it is better to use Google Sitemaps and of course most of the bots don't like that content changes, imagine yourself as a bot.. When crawling the same link, every time getting a different title, description and content isn't to good, you write content and leave it there until you write content for another link, of course if you find something or want to update, add things when go and update.. The more dynamic the page content is the less you'll get indexed normally on most of the crawling bots. However, if you won't update every second day, I guess it's nothing bad.. So I guess this means that frequent editing of the same url is bad.. For example, why google likes Blogs, you write an article or something and it stays like that..

I can give a tip, like showing a lot of statistics in some sidebar of your site, you're 45312 user, you're 123 user today, you'll 791 user this week, today is Sunday, it is spring and more such of things is pointless if you put everything in one place, even though it might look cool, you can do that, but not on every page I guess.. I am not saying to not use such things, but I think some of you got the idea.. For counters to displays visitors it is a good idea to show images, the bot won't see a difference in the content, but the user will see another number.. ;]