Rankings are very much important in getting your page noticed by your audience. The first page of a search engine list is considered to be the prime spot, as many users often look up to here for their search. However, rankings aren't permanent, in fact, they can change by the hour. This means that you need to closely monitor your rankings and be prepared in case it changes.
By now you probably understand how the search engines work and how to work around this to get a good advantage. However, there are still other factors beside the technical stuff that can affect your rankings. In order to maintain your good rankings or in order to climb to the top of the search page, you need to know how to use them to your advantage.
One of the biggest factors that can affect your rankings is on-site changes that you make. Any change in content might include changes in keywords depending on the content that you added. Or that the links that you put in are themselves not quite popular in search engines.
Aside from changing content, changing the overall structure of your site can have a large effect on your rankings. Your meta tags, for example, plays a big part in letting search engines crawl your pages for indexing. Any change that you make in, either for accommodating and managing content or to simply make the whole site different, will have an effect.
This doesn't mean that the solution here is to not change content. In fact, it's the stupidest way to go. Rather you need to change your site frequently in order to keep up with competitors. However, you need to be sure that the changes that you made will be accompanied by measures to maintain your rankings. For example, if you add new content, you need to follow it with a good optimization strategy in order for it to be noticed. Also, avoid making any drastic changes unless it is indeed necessary.
On the other hand, competitors can also make changes to their sites, which can affect their rankings relative to yours. This one you really can not control, so instead you need to respond quickly in order to at least negate the effects of their changes. You should be quite vigilant about this and frequently look up your competitors in order to see what they are doing and implement changes to your own sites. You can even be a little cunning and exploit the changes that they make to your own advantage. Again, be aware that the changes that you make might backfire onto you.
Another factor that you have totally no control of are the changes that search engines make to their algorithms search engines often change their ranking formulas in order to keep up with the developing trends in optimization or to introduce new technology. They may also change their systems to combat harmful exploits and to maintain fair rankings. Luckily, search engines don't engines don't change their algorithms that often. You do still need to watch out for announcements that come out from engines, as these can appear without notice. You then need to implement necessary measures the moment these changes come out in order to be ahead of the pack.