Search engine rankings seems to be the only benchmark for SEO campaigns. Are search engines rankings a correct indicator of the health of your SEO campaign?
definitely. A Hardwork done on seo of anysite will result in better search engine ranking. it is a true indicator of seo campaign
Certainly. You will know when you've done your job when rankings improve. However it's not necessarily a good indicator of health. For instance if rank moves down by one or 2 or simply stays the same after a week this isn't necessarily a bad thing it could just be that the engines haven't crawled over new links yet. In this case it's not right to say "The campaign isn't in good health, it's doing poorly" when all that's required is a bit of patience.
Although rankings are the major scale for SEO, it is the increase in Sales for the Company/Client. You should focus on your Conversion Rate and the associated web pages as well.
high rankings are very important because if its high on the search engines than that means it will get lots of exposure, it will also be targeted traffic because people will be visiting your site from a certain keyword
Why is it that sometimes when I do a search on a term in my blog its on the 2nd page and then sometimes on the 5th page. What is changing this considering I never change the content of this one page?
Thank you for all the inputs. I was hoping that I could add something to this discussion. As catanich pointed out, it is the sales/conversion that matter the most. A more apt metric to measure the effectiveness of a SEO campaign. I have had many clients in the past who wanted to rank on the first page of the website. I tried to show them a more holistic picture - website usability, customer experience and conversion. They wouldn't budge. I got them the traffic they wanted but no sales. That got them thinking and then I explained to them. Ranking is vital but what would you do with the visitors when your website is not geared to convert them. Eventually they understood but not before they have lost a couple of thousand visitors.
The true measure of SEO is the ranking on search engines. SEO is all about optimizing a website so that the site ranks well in SERPs. BUT, while SEO is an essential part of a website marketing plan, it is not the only thing that is important. The site must be useable and have good content that leads to conversions. A site can have GREAT SEO and have many visitors, but if only SEO is taken into account when marketing, writing and promoting a website, the site will have a hard time being successful.
I have been experiencing a similar issue with google myself. Most days I am on page 2 for a particular keyword and some days like today I don't even seem to show up and when I do its not my main page but posts showing up usually on the 3rd page. I don't get it but I don't have many back links, one on a PR1 video site and my signature on here that seems to maybe shift weight on different days. The site just launched recently also... I was excited when I started getting 40 clicks from google but I know that's not really nothing... Am I right in thinking I need get some related sites with PR to link to me?
Of course. It's where most of the source of traffic comes from. It is very webmasters desire to achieve the highest possible search engine ranking by applying SEO techniques.
You have one interestin conversation here. Let me put my own opinions on the table: There ore two different ways on SEO, onpage and offpage. Onpage -> you put that keyword what you are using into the domain, description, H1 tag and maybe on H2 tag. Then you bold, underline or other ways highligt that particular keyword from you content. If you can put a link on some of them to somewhere relevant, it gets more power. Also, local hosting and country specific .ending to your domainname will help. That's all you need to do and that's all you can do. It's usefull, but not enough. Then you need backlinks and that offpage SEO. You can ask any SEO guru out there and they all will say this: "With enough high quality backlinks you can outrank anything". Still, there is something to remember. You put too many links too fast, you find your self in sandbox. 5/day is enough... Is it hard to get on #1 page in Google? Well, what's you keyword? If it's something like digital cameras...you will never be there if you don't use some un-ethical bootings to your site. Home carpet cleaners? You will be there less than a month...if you know what to do (done that...I got third). SEO is art and I love that art very much. ;o)