In a highly-competitive, global internet environment, brands and businesses need every bit of benefit they can find. At the same time, avoiding potentially damaging developments is an absolute must. There is no greater example of how these negative occurrences can hurt you than in search engine results. SEO exists to help promote high-quality content in search results for all major search engines, but sometimes, the algorithms might detect potential problems. In order to avoid this, you need to be proactive in your SEO reputation management. Today, we’ll review how you can avoid negative SEO effects by keeping an eye on a few problematic areas.

Watch Page Speed

One of the biggest reasons why great websites perform poorly in search is due to page speed. While it may seem like your website would operate at a constant speed, many different factors can slow it down over time. An added number of plug-ins, unoptimized databases, changes by your hosting provider and a variety of other happenings can all slow down a website that was once running well. In order to ensure that your SEO reputation isn’t harmed, you’ll want to be pinging networks on a weekly basis to determine page speeds. Some fluctuation is normal, but a sudden and prolonged drop in page speed could ultimately hurt your rankings in SERPs.

Keep an Eye on Your Links

One of the best ways to gradually build credibility with search engines is by link building. Through the creation of great content and/or a consistent web presence, earning some high-quality links is inevitable. Unfortunately, you cannot take these links for granted – or assume that all earned links are good ones. You can use any number of tools to analyze your backlinks and determine if any have recently went missing (it is not uncommon for competitors to masquerade as you, asking for links to be removed). Likewise, this will help you catch any questionable websites linking back to you that might harm your SEO reputation.

Stay on Top of Alerts

What better way to keep track of your SEO reputation than by signing up for alerts from the search engines themselves? You can easily configure via Google any number of alerts – thanks to Google Webmaster Tools – that’ll tell you a variety of things. Some examples include whether any new pages on your site have been indexed, whether or not hidden malware and the like is targeting your website, how your actual server is performing and whether Google has manually added any penalties relating to SEO to your website. By pinging networks on Google and Bing for these alerts on a regular basis, you’ll spot the first sign of any trouble.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was your SEO influence. Ultimately, small changes over time can have a big impact. You need to be informed of the factors that can slowly but surely impact your otherwise top-notch SEO strategy. By keeping an eye on site speed, links and alerts that tell you what is happening, you’ll be able to continue dominating in SERPs and avoid any potential penalties in the future.