Online Traffic and Ranking Fluctuation: What Causes it?

Change is the inevitable truth of life and it applies to website traffic too. The rankings and traffic online keeps changing, but not because of search engines always. The fluctuation may be caused by a number of factors as given below:

Local vs. Global News and Information
It is not only the online factors, but the offsite factors too have a hand in the website positions getting affected. One such factor is the fact whether you have substantial amount of current news, incidents in your site as well as your offline marketing strategies.Basically traffic gets affected by the users buying behavior and interests. Similarly the latest sports, T.V, music, or weather industry news also contribute to a website's fluctuating rankings and positions.

The Highly competitive Web Site Market
Every other day, a new web site dealing in the same products or services as you shows up in search engines. It is a highly competitive arena and as new sites get indexed, old sites are removed and new ones added and amended. It is important that you employ ethical search engine optimization techniques and also keep an eye on the competitors' strategies and techniques being used so that you know what they are upto.

The Google Sandbox
Another reason for fluctuating website rankings and online traffic is the use of 'sandbox' by search engines like Google. It is believed by some web optimizers that Google uses 'sandbox' phenomenon where new or penalized websites are kept, thus not showing an accurate ranking of these websites in the SERPs. It is only when these websites come out of the sandbox (usually in between 3 to 6 months) before showing the right rankings and positions in the search results. And in case your site is pretty old, pull up your socks and renew it with fresh content for the search engines to spider and index. This is a known fact that regularly updated and reviewed sites are indexed more often than stale and old ones, and this makes a big difference to the rankings.

Trying a shortcut for rankings
Blaming the search engine algorithms for your site's fluctuating rankings is wrong when you yourself indulge in wrong and unethical practices to rank well and fast. Using unethical ways to reach higher rankings and earn more targeted traffic may work for some time, but in the long run, it is caught by the vigilant eyes of the search engine spiders. And when you are caught, the after effects are as bad as from getting penalized to getting banned.

Changing the keyword density
Even a small change, alteration, addition or deletion in the keyword density of your webpages can fluctuate and change the ranking and traffic of your site. So, before you decide to make changes in your keywords and phrases, do keep in mind SEO rankings and traffic in mind.

Fiddling with the code
Any changes or modifications in the HTML source code, layouts, designs can fluctuate the rankings and traffic of a web site. In fact even renaming pages, altering file extensions can adversely affect the rankings of a website.

Removal of links
We know how important linking is for websites to gain higher rankings and more targeted traffic in the search engines. One reason for change in your website ranking could be the removal of links to your website from some highly relevant website or irrelevance of the link as a result of your altering some pages.

Unreliable server
How stable is your server? This question is important because your ranking also depends upon the server's stability. The server needs to be not only efficient, but also reliable in terms of load time and functioning. If the server is not upto the mark, or creates errors while spidering, the site may be excluded from the search engines.

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Forums for Better Generation of Targeted Traffic:Part II

Endorsing and Supporting Your Forum:Community Building

In the last blog we discussed about the importance and some of the features of a forum. In this blog, we will further discuss the promotion and advancement tips and strategies of a forum. A forum is a kind of living entity and community without having any external interference. In fact the promotion and launch of your forum should be based upon a strong community base that you should start building much before the actual launch. Because a forum is nothing without the support of a strong, stable, loyal, and active community.

Building a community for your forum is not so difficult, just requires some enterprising efforts from your side. It is always better to make a network of friends, aquaintances, and know more and more people by entering a community started by someone else. Start contributing your thoughts and ideas to that community, ask questions, answer others' queries, and gain reputation.Making more contacts will always help you in the long run when you launch your own forum. There will be many in your contact list who will be keen on helping and supporting you in your forum endeavor.

After launching your forum, the next thing to do is to invite people to join your forum through your site news section and newsletter.You can begin by making some posts with those forums of which you are a member already. There is a possibility that some of your known people join and promote your forum, thus increasing it's popularity.

You can even ask your friends to post announcements about your forum's launch on their respective sites. This may make them interested in linking to your forum or some posts in your forum that they find exciting or relevant to them. Not only this, you need to be a leader all the way in order to call more and more people to your site. Learn the ways of entertaining people and their queries, questions, and enquiries in the right spirit and provide informative, relevant, to the point answers to them.

Another important thing is to make your forum live and active by finding out the different members' interest level in your forum and inspire those who seem to be less interested by stimulating their interest buds with your posts. For this you could start a poll on your forum related to some interesting, comunication enhancing subject or topic. To make your poll seen by more people you can put an announcement about it and some of its results on the index page.

The most important thing to remember is that you are like the gardener of the forum and the moment you neglect it, not prune or keep it in shape, nobody will visit your garden. You have to in fact encourage more people to come to your garden by asking them to make their valuable contributions to it.

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Four ways in which RSS wins over Emails

Though emails will never be completely redundant from our lives in times to come, but a better alternative to them has already evolved with the name of RSS. It helps you syndicate, distribute or display latest news summaries from other web sites on your web site or read them on those sites that collect these feeds.

1.You are your own boss as you get what you want

You like reading fashion news, so, you would probably subscribe to a fashion magazine and not a general magazine that provides you information about every walk of life, including fashion. You want to read only that thing which interests you. RSS will give you only the information that you want. The moment you instruct the feed reader to stop collecting feeds of a site, it will stop.

2. No fear of Spamming

Being a web page, RSS cannot be blocked unlike emails. The result is an uncluttered, Spam free, 'of your choice' content that doesn't irritate, rather gets read by you. You can have more people reading your content as they will be free from all fear of spamming.

3. Say goodbye to overloaded email servers

If you have to send a message or newsletter to a big list of subscribers, your mail server will be completely clogged and will take ages to send the content. But, RSS downloading is the same as that of a web page. It will deliver the page as and when requested, not all at once.

4. An automated filtering of content

Imagine the volume and intensity of content that seems to be ever growing till eternity. RSS will be the ultimate answer to active,real-time, automated filtering of this growing content. In other words, you can make huge advertising revenue by giving readers what they want, on their conditions, and according to their schedules.

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Four Pillars of good Web Marketing

Gone are the days when business enterprises use to market and advertise their products and services through T.V, radio or newspaper alone. This is the age of IT revolution and rightly so. And one of the boons of this revolution is the concept of 'web marketing' or 'internet marketing'. To define this term in simple and uncomplicated way, web marketing is a way of marketing your products or services online, through the internet,or on world wide web. This concept has also given a new dimension to the existence of web sites that are no longer just a pretty looking place to go to and get entertained.

Today, web sites perform a very important function of informing as well as attracting clients to your business. And why not? When you can advertise in a much cheaper, faster, and efficient manner than the traditional methods. But before you actually begin to execute your web marketing startegy, remember these four elements that act as the pillars of any good web marketing campaign:

1. Making your site as visitor friendly as possible. The more complicated and confusing the look and navigation of the site for the visitors, lesser are the chances of it getting popular. It has to be user friendly, easily accessible, and credible, so that people feel egged on to perfom the action you want them to perform.

2. Your web site has to be search engine friendly. People should be able to locate it and search for it easily to be able to access it further. Do not just create a site in haste thinking that it will be seen, nevertheless. Always put your heart and soul, do some logical thinking while creating it. After all, a well designed site that the search engines identify easily, can be a money grosser for your business.

3. There has to be a 'feel good' factor about your site. Think like a customer. Make them feel comfortable and build rapport with them. Treat your web site just like your office or showroom where people come, have a look and form an impression. Offer them some great privileges, free services or products with something that they buy,etc., in other words, win them forever with your excellent services and schemes.

4. Think of ways to economize on the costs incurred and increasing sales. Take the web site as any other marketing tool and do not go overboard spending to much on making it popular. Your mantra should be a cost effective site that has the capability of churning huge profits for you. Because if you are spending more on marketing, and making less money, or no profit, it means that it's time to do some rethinking and resettle your financial decisions again.

If you keep these four essential elements of Search Engine Optimization in mind, there is no reason that you cannot win in the ever multiplying web marketing race.

Maintaining High Rankings in Search Engines

You are very happy today and rightly so. You have stood first in the class , and have instantly become popular and the envy of all other students at the same time. But you don't remain persistent in your efforts to maintain that first position and your rivals take advantage of your complacency and sluggishness. They try to find out the ways and methods by which you achieved highest rank in class and work on those strategies that you employed. Soon you find yourself out of the race and do not remain a topper for long. Similarly, SEO is also not only about achieving a high ranking once and for all, but also maintaining that position for times to come.
Things to keep in mind for maintaining high rankings in search engines:

1. It always better to rank high for multiple keywords and phrases than for a single keyword/phrase.
2. Although there is nothing wrong in updating your site with new, relevant information, it is not recommended to make major changes or rewriting already highly ranked pages.
3. Keep track of constantly changing indexing algorithms of search engines in order to maintain high rankings.
4. To remain one step ahead of your competitors, it is important to keep optimizing your site regularly.
5. It is very essential to check your rankings regularly as it keeps you in touch with any droppings or change in your position.
6. When you are at the top, you make more enemies than friends. Your competitors will visit your site, study and analyse the source code and try to improve their own rankings. So, it is better to protect the html code from being seen by others. One way of doing this is to enter white spaces before begining the source code. Inserting at least two screens of white spaces in every web page before writing the html code will trick the visitors into thinking that you have some html hiding strategy and they might lose interest in scrolling down to view the code.
7. Look for all other related websites that can link with you and increase your link popularity.
8. It is really helpful if you know which pages you submitted and when, and re-adding them on the search engines' database as scheduled. Becuase if you don't keep track of the submissions, you run a high risk of submitting your pages so often that you may get penalized.

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Beware of Paid Text Ads: Not a very good SEO practice

Well, Google primarily started it all and now the whole concept of monetizing the links is coming back full circle to have the most disastrous impact on Google itself. As the saying goes, "As you sow, So shall you reap", Google will have to take link buying by companies to increase their pagerank with a pinch of salt. Imagine the services of two doctors, one who works pretty hard and takes extra care of patients to build his reputation and the other who pays his patients to spread a word or two about his good work to their contacts and friends around.

In simple words, paid text ads. may be compared to the second doctor. What actually happens in a paid text ad. game is that you place your ad on innumerable sites and pages by paying a price for such a service. Buying links to increase one's pagerank in SEO may not be an ethical thing to do, still those who don't indulge in it remain at a disadvantage as these bought ads. do have a high click through rate as compared to banner ads. If you have noticed the mysterious delay by Google to make some sites and pages in its index to appear, it is all because of paid text links. Since Google can't find the difference between paid links and free ads., it puts all new links on hold to scare and stop the link buyers. But this practice of putting on hold sites harms the innocent sites also as they may be deleted too. No doubt, the number of inbound links are considered by search engines, but it is the quality and relevance of the links that surpasses the quantity, when it comes to according pagerank to a site.

Google stands to get a severe setback if these paid text ads. continue unchecked as Google does not receive any share in this ad. money and will eventually lose demand for its Adword service. The reason being that people will rather prefer to pay to web sites who provide the paid text ad. service to place your site in the highest ranks of search engines than paying extorbitant bids for Google's Adwords and Adsense service.

In a nutshell, though paid text ads. may appear to be an alluring, easy, and fast alternative for higher rankings than the normal SEO activities and strategies, it is still a very dangerous and debatable area, so it is better to avoid employing it for improving your rankings.

http://www.segnant.com/

Increase Your Online Presence with SEO

Playing By Googles Rules

As the undisputable leader in search engines, Google places a very high importance on the quality and relevancy of its search results, especially now that the company is public. The know that in order to keep the shareholders and users of the engine happy, the quality of returned results are extremely important. For this reason, doing the wrong thing, purposely or unintentionally could result in a severe penalty or even get you get you banned from the listings. Below is a short list of ideas to consider when drafting your search engine optimization campaign.

Hidden Links

Link PR is becoming a hot topic among seo firms, however whether or not incoming/outgoing links still play an as important role as they used to, it still considered a ”blackhat” technique that can and most likely will result in a ban or penalty from Google.

Hidden Text

Stuffing your pages with text to small to read, same color as the background, or using css to push the text of screen for the sole purpose of loading your pages with content rich keywords and copy will also get you awarded the same penalties as hiding links.

Page Cloaking

The practice of using browser or bot sniffers to serve the bots a different page then your human visitors may see. Loading a page specifically for a bot that a human user may never see will most certainly get you banned from the listings.

Multiple Submissions

Submitting your domain and pages thereof is also a big thing to stay away from. For example if I submit http://www.seohype.com and http://www.seohype.com/resources.html as two separate urls, I may be looking at a ban, penalty or at the least; a very long time before my pages get submitted. This is another reason to avoid auto submitters. Make sure you check if your domain is listed already in the search engine you are submitting too, if it is… move on to the next.

Link Farms

Be careful who and even what you are linking to. Links in to your site will not hurt, even Google knows you cannot control your links in. However you can certainly control what you link to. Link farming has always been a bad apple in Googles eye and should be avoided at all costs. Google also suggest that your own link pages should not contain more then 100 links, assume anything higher then 100 links on a single page will get you classed as a link farm and avoid doing it.

Selling Your Sites PageRank

Time and time again I come across sites selling there pr7 links or ONLY trading links with certain pr sites. This will cause a ban or penalty as well. Its okay to sell the advertising, or the gain the link, but doing so based on direct advertisement of your page rank is a sure way to get the bad end of the stick from Google.

Doorways

This is similar to cloaking pages. The practice of having one page loaded with your choice keywords that simply re-direct to another more “user friendly” page is also a big issue for Google. My clients get offers all the time from other seo firms offering these kinds of “services”. If you get these offers, avoid them at ALL costs.

Same Content on Multiple Domains

Google looks at domain IPs, dates they were registered, etc. Having multiple domains serving the exact same content is a no no as well. This also applies to serving the same content multiple times on separate pages, sub-domains and forwarding multiple domains to the same content.

Source: http://www.site-reference.com/Search-Engines/5973/index.html

Fighting Click Fraud: The Enemy No.1 of PPC Campaign

Click Fraud, an illegal practice of clicking on the ad links appearing next to search results with the intention of making the advertisers pay for the clicks, must be deterred and checked by online advertisers if they want to save their precious campaign money. There has to be an auditing system that checks and stops any fraud clicking. Just thinking that it is too complex a problem, or that reporting about it could damage your free listings is being selfish and ruining your own business prospects in the long run.There have been companies that have fearlessly reported click fraud to search engines and have received refunds for fraudulent clicks. Some of the click fraud detection companies and softwares that have come up are as follows:

ClickDetective Software that tracks return visitors to your site and alerts you in case of a site being a prey to click fraud. Every click is shown in real time through its report.

BogusClick lets advertisers determine the IP addresses of competitors, originating PPC search engines and partner sites involved and keywords used.

Clicklab applies a series of tests to each visitor session and assigns scores and then calculations are made to indicate good/bad sessions to show an advertiser the quality of traffic.

WhosClickingWho.com is a fraud detector that tracks all PPC search engines, detects multiple IP's, starts a 'ClickMinder' as soon as an abuser or fraud person clicks for more than five times on a link.

There may be more such sites and softwares that can help an advertiser overcome the menace of click fraud. What is required is a willingness and determination on the part of the advertiser to end this dirty game before it sucks all your revenue and money invested in PPC campaigns.

http://www.segnant.com/

Increase your reach and traffic on the world web:Use RSS

Well friends, the new kid on the block is RSS, that stands for Really Simple Syndication, a kind of blog searching service, or a search engine that does not crawl in order to accept or search content on the web, but recieves RSS feeds to do so. RSS feeds is a way of making others aware of the content posted by you, the site owner.In other words, through RSS, you can increase the reach of and traffic to your web site and web publisher who uses it. Basically, RSS syndicates your content by distributing links to your content that you want others to see or use. RSS is an electronic feed that sends content to the recipient.

How does RSS cast its magical spell on your content?

If you have a website, and your primary focus is to bring more traffic as well as customers to your site, RSS can breathe life into your sagging business.All you have to do is to add a short n sweet code to your web page(s), and that's it. Yes, it is so simple and quick! Any other web site having a similar code as yours can include text or headlines from the publishing site (in this case you). What better and faster way to attract more traffic to your site than listing the page that you want people to see as an 'item' in your RSS file. This will make that particular page be seen by people who read information using RSS readers.Not only this, with this unique tool, people, especially the bloggers who do this, can easily add links to your content within their own web pages.

It's Absolutely Free!

The icing on the cake is that publishing and the publishing tools for your content or headlines in RSS are essentially free. You'll have to remember adding an "item" to your RSS feed every time you write,post and publish new content on your website.

RSS versus blog

RSS search engines are a step ahead of blog search engines as any web site can distribute its content via RSS. And as not all blogs distribute content through RSS, it is likely that an RSS search engine misses a part of the weblogs that exist.

RSS versus Emailing

RSS receivers do a retrieval of selective information and according to their schedule. The web site owner informs people of any new content in his web site,by showing headlines and links to his content to others without the hassle of his e-mailing those very links to his list subscribers and that too within a few minutes or hours of publishing the content. So goodbye to bulky and unmanageable email boxes now! RSS revolution is here to stay.

RSS and E-commerce

Employ an RSS notification service and get alerted whenever the items you need become available. This is what the smart buyers are doing today.If you want to sell online, you need to study this technology to attract online buyers to your site.
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