What to do after you rank in the top 10 for some keywords

A friend of mine asked me the other day:

I was wondering something. Once your website is in the top 10 for one or more key phrases, what do you do? I don’t think I’ve ever seen any advice on how to maintain your status in the top 10 once you’re there.

That’s an interesting question, and here is my answer:

The quick answer is that you need to keep on doing the things you are already doing to maintain your website’s ranking for those keywords. But, you can work on that a little less and start working on adding content to get your site ranking for MORE keywords. The more keywords your site ranks for the better (see this article on the long tail for more details).

Consider finding other ways to draw traffic to your site (participating in related forums, posting comments on related blogs, starting a related blog, etc.)

You should also consider adding more products, more articles, a blog, and/or adding a related forum, etc. If you add related articles, which may help draw more traffic, you can also utilize those pages to add additional streams of income through Google Adsense or affiliate links on the article pages.

I have one site that I have done zero optimization on over the last six months and yet it continues to rank in the top 5 for most of the keywords it is targeting. People continue to link to it, because it’s a really great site. I think that one of the most important things you can do is to make your site link worthy. If you make a great site, people are going to want to link to it, and that makes it so much easier to get traffic.

The bottom line is that you need to stay the course and continue doing what you are doing. Make your site into something link worthy, and you will never have to worry about traffic.

PS. Another option would be to start another related site and repeat what you did with the last site to get traffic to the new site and monetize it.