Hi everyone. My client has several internal pages on his blog showing up on page one of Google searches for some pretty good keywords. Some of the good SERP ranking are constant, while a couple of them would go up for a week and then drop into oblivion. My question is, should we tweak those pages to make them more attractive to Google, so that they can stay on the front page? Or should we leave well enough alone? By tweaking I mean adding more info and more useful links to the articles themselves. By making the pages more helpful, maybe Google users will stay at our page longer and signal to Google that we deserve to be on the front page of the SERP. On the other hand, I'm afraid of messing up some magical keyword density that we achieved accidentally. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
I normally would have been inclined to say add the contnet, but with the recent results I have seen, i'm freaked out about changing anything on my sites either. I'd be inclined to leave the pages also.
If they are already in the top ten, the safest thing to do is to try to get more backlinks from relevant sites and leave the content alone.
Ohhhh yes, let the content beeee. Get more inbound links and that should help keep the site in the top results! G'luck!
Personally, I would think its best to update those pages, as long as you add related content to those pages it would help them maintain the rankings. As Google thinks those pages are already relevant to the search term that they are ranking for, adding new relevant content would only incline Google to keep that page within the top 10 as its fresh and relevant content. But you should much sure what you are adding to the page is of value, which could be hard at times as it might dilute the keywords that your client is targeting for.
Thank you for the excellent advice everyone. I think a good backlinks campaign is an excellent idea. It makes me feel proactive without jeopardizing the actual content. As for the content being fresh, this particular website is a blog that gets new entires every 6-12 hours, so overall I think Google considers it a frequently updated website.
I agree with the above statements that off-page factors are your best bet for improvement, but on-page can still help you. You should be fine if you only change one thing at a time and wait to see what happens. If G drops you for one of your target searches change the pages back immediately and your previous rankings should return.