Once you reach the top 10 position, how do you maintain that position? Do you have to constantly build backlinks to make sure they you have more than your competitors? Also, would it be recommended to stay with the same SEO expert that brought you to the top 10 to maintain that position or is it possible to keep it up by yourself (since it requires less work than getting it up there in the first place).
You must build backlinks all the time. If you stop with promoting your web site you could end on second page. Link building is constant work and I do it all the time.
That's a lot of work (I wonder if it's worth the investment and time.. surely depends on the site's revenue though). How long does it take for a ranking to drop? Is it a slow decline or suddenly?
That depends on lot of factors. If you have very old and authoritative site you could stay in top 10 for a long time, but with new site you could see a lot of fluctuations in rankings. Link building is ongoing process, I would say this is constant work if you want to reach top 3 or stay in top 10 in very competitive niche.
SEO is a never ending process. Once you achieve top ranking for one keyword, expand into ranking for you secondary and then tertiary keywords
Maybe overnight, maybe never. It depends on your site, users, and keywords, plus the competitive sphere of the net. ( Er, sort of like how there's a "blogsphere," there's a huge number of sites dedicated to mortgage. ) Without a lot more info, it's hard to give a good answer. If you don't have much competition for those keywords, you're not going to slide, at least not much. If it's for profit, though, probably low competition means a good niche someone else is likely to discover, eventually. But, like you noticed, constant link building takes a lot of time, and you could either be doing other things to promote your site, or something fun. So there's definitely an "opportunity cost" to constantly dropping links, and you want to balance that against the rest of the big picture. On the other hand, directory and forum links seem like they're being devalued. If you can put together a cool applet, or some other attractive content, and put it on the same page, people will create a lot of links for you. If you can afford to, you might want to stop building links for a couple weeks and watch what happens to (1) your search position and (2) your traffic.
This isn't necessarily true, depending on the competition for the keyword and how active your competitors are. Some of our top 10 sites have been there for over a year without much effort invested, certainly not as much effort as it took to get there. That said though I notice that once you're in the top 10 or so your backlinks just increase anyway, because people are linking to you because you're easy to find and you have something to offer them (hopefully). Usually these links come from blogs, services like del.icio.us, forums, etc. You also tend to get a lot of link requests, 95% of which are garbage but usually a good couple every week from relatively authoritative sites. This doesn't apply to the high traffic keywords like gambling, pornography, online pharmacy, mlm, etc. There is so much activity and turn over it's almost impossible to stand pat and stay on top, but luckily we only traffic in saner waters .
Backlinks are just one part of SEO. Fresh contents are important too. Stale contents make your site irrelevant in the eye of search engines. So, perhaps adding more information for visitors or adding a blog would help too. If you have great contents, other people will link to your site That means free backlinks.
You need to continue your link building if you want to stay on your position. And target other keywords that you think might give you more traffic.
Hard to tell or manipulate on how long you stay on SERPs, cause competition is always on.. Just continue the way you do when the time your on top then additional task for improvements..
if you have jumped into the top 10 then you are definitely doing something right so the best thing to do would be to keep on doing what your doing if its bringing results.
Link Building is the never ending process and seo we used this process everyday. You must used your keywords as to indexed it in the major search engines
If you are on the top today, Much better if you continue and improve what you are doing today because you never what will happen in the future.Don't forget Google Fluctuate every time.
Staying on top has a lot of Factors to maintain... Because every day Google gather fresh content, So that you must have to continue SEO your site.
Above all: 1.Build backlins all the times! Link building is a never ending process! 2.Continue your SEO,SEO is a constant work! 3.More pages,target more keywords that you think might give you more traffic! 4.More original or attractive content to make your site anthoritative and attractant! 5.Try Link baiting to get more free backlinks and traffic! 5.Adding a blog would help too! and go on.......
I think one should start outsourcing all these article writing stuff and link building once they start earning enough from their site. And then just start with another and then another.