When we spend endless hours and thousands of dollars on our website’s online promotion, it is only natural to be anxious about the results and our website’s performance online. Keeping a close tab on the performance of our website and its rankings is very important, and you should never be blindsided by swings in rankings!

Search engine rankings and top positions fluctuate fast, and vary from engine to engine. Sometimes you will find only a minor variation between engines, but at other times you may see a vast difference within a short period of time. Unless you keep track of these fluctuations you can’t plan your next course of action.

Checking your website’s pagerank in Google toolbar once a month is not enough! You need to make sure that you constantly check your ranking for all the keywords for which you have optimized. If you don’t check regularly You might be under the presumption you are ranking high in the search results page for a particular keyword when this is not the case.

Your conversions and your traffic rate can plummet and you will waste valuable time trying to track down the source of the problem. Stay on top of it, and avoid nasty surprises by nipping possible slippings in the bud. If you notice that your rankings have dropped down in good time then you will be able to reinforce your efforts and restore the site’s ranking for that particular keyword.

Some websites can be quite seasonal -holiday gifts and any other website that does brisk business around a holiday cannot afford to be pushed down during that holiday season. If you don’t keep a tab on the position of such keywords, you will miss out on your opportunity that year and be forced to wait for next year before you can get that kind of traffic again and increase your conversion rates.

It is also not enough to keep track of your rankings in just one search engine. You MUST check the rankings for Yahoo and Bing as well. You may see minor variations and freaking out is not needed - although more reinforcement is highly recommended.

However, if you find a drastic difference such as being pushed from page 1 to page 3 of the search results then you need to review your website and find the problem area. If you are paying regular attention to your website’s ranking, you can save your website from major drops in the position. Just never use black hat tactics to artificially change your position! This can result in real openalties, and leave you worse off than before.

If you were to change the structure of your website leaving very little content, or if you add unoptimized content which reduces the overall keyword density of your site, this could adversely effect your ranking. The same goes for your web design. If you frequently make changes to your web design and shift around your linking structure, you might end up harming your web rankings.

Of course, not all change is negative - if you make changes to the text for the better and improve the structure of your web page, there will definitely be improvement in your site rankings as well.

When you make a change to your website, make sure you keep the regularity of Google indexing in mind. If your site is indexed once a month, try to do updates in a luimp before the next sweep. Keep as much of the original content and site structure intact, and don’t fix what ain’t broke. Even popular news sites have a set pattern of displaying data; updates occur in a specific section of the site, relieving the spiders from having to index massive changes every single update.

If you do need to update and your rankings are already good, follow these steps:

Add new content on a separate page so your original content is intact. You can add a news or what’s new? feature to your site instead of making frequent changes to the whole website. This is a smart and search engine friendly way of adding new content to the site.

However, don’t put a link for every new page on the home page, as this might decrease the ranking of the home page. Make one link to a separate what’s new section and add new pages or events to that area on a regular basis.

If you have to make changes to main site structure, make them as discreetly as possible. This will help keep distribution of Page Rank stable. for major do-overs, shut down for a day or two and revamp.

No matter what the change to your website, the change probably will impact your ranking - whether it is a good or bad change is up to you and how you go about the process. If you do it right you will benefit from these changes instead of losing valuable ranking.

The most recent examples of’ ‘Twitter-hacking’ include the invasion and hijacking of accounts owned by Britney Spears and famed blogger/entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki.

Amit Klein, CTO of security firm Trusteer, believes that Twitter account hijacking is an issue that more people need to be aware of. In a recent interview with WebPro News, Klien said:

“Typically, criminals hijack Twitter accounts in order to spread malware. That is, they abuse the hijacked accounts to post messages to all the “followers”, with a link to a site that serves malware. In the Guy Kawasaki incident, for example (not a classic account hijacking, but still a malware spreading campaign), of the 139,000 followers, it is estimated that hundreds got infected. Earlier this year, accounts of 33 celebrities (among them Barack Obama - 1.6 million followers, and Britney Spears - 2.1 million followers) were hijacked.

AK went on to state that twitter accounts can be used to send malware links and plain spam to followers, and that this ios much more common than pmost people think - only high profile celebs get publicized when their accounts are hacked.

Klein gave some recommendations for keeping your Twitter account safe:

1. Protect your twitter credentials - be vigilant and keep on the look out for Twitter phishing attacks, and pharming (DNS poisoning) attacks. You can install client side security tools that ensure you are only providing Twitter credentials to the genuine twitter website. This will protect your credentials against keyloggers or malicious browser plug-ins (”man in the browser” attacks).

2. Control and protect your twitter information. 3rd party applications and services that enhance Twitter can increase your exposure to abuse. Every website which is allowed to automatically post to yourTwitter account adds attack surface that criminals may exploit!

3. Also be aware of the practice called “twitter-squatting”, (which involves names of people/organizations being registered by fraudsters or pranksters. Monitor for such registrations, or better yet, to register brand names and individual names as early as possible to thwart such attacks. Also watch out for another threat associated with Twitter, which is abusing “Trending Topics” to serve malware. The attack involves sending many tweets (with malicious links) with some special keyword in them, so that this keyword will show up as a trend in the “Trending Topics” list at twitter.com. A user that views a sample tweet for this keyword and clicks on the malicious link will be served malware.

Right from day one you must make efforts to build your website’s trust so that search engine can rank and rate you accordingly. It is very difficult for search engines to consider all the websites online equally, they use various parameters to trust a site. One of the factors that is consider to help in building trust is your domain age. Domains that have been around for a while with good standing are trusted by search engines. Aged domains indicate to search engines that you are not there to spam the internet but you mean serious business. On this count new websites may face problems as they cannot expect the search engines to trust them based on their age.

However, you can deal with this problem by increasing your domain registration duration. If you register your domain for just one year hoping to renew your domain name every year, then you need to rethink this approach and try to get your domain registered for a longer period. If you register your domain just for one year, search engines do not have enough reason to trust you. On the other hand if you register your domain for 10 years you are more likely to win the trust of the search engines. Longer domain registration will tell the search engines that you are not here to just spam and close out once you are done. However, there is no official word on this from any of the search engines. This is just an observation by SEO experts and their industry knowledge. This is more of a common sense view. You will certainly not lose anything by registering your domain for multiple years. You will lock the price to today’s value, which will be of advantage to you cost wise. If the domain registration period has to be taken in to consideration by the search engines then you will lose out unnecessarily. On this factor, you actually could have saved yourself and enjoyed the trust.

The next important factor is do not link your site to other websites that do not have good standing just because you are getting your permanent link. If the site that you are linking is questionable then your site too will have problems in winning the trust of the search engines. So, to whom you are linking your website is more important than who is linking to you when it comes to building trust.

Most of the times we enthusiastically set up our PPC campaign and check every morning for the total number of clicks that our ads received and start our day happily without really calculating what kind of conversions we have got through those leads. Soon we even forget about our campaign as our credit card is billed every month automatically. This can be one of the costliest marketing mistakes that you can make. When you set up your PPC campaign, you need to have a system in place to ensure that the performance of your ads are tracked. You should have your own PPC goals over a period of time after careful study you will be able to assess the performance of your PPC campaign. To acquire this level of understanding you need to spend time daily to check the statistics and interpret them prudently. This may be highly time consuming and not all of us have the luxury of having that kind of time to spare.

Moreover, we need to be proficient enough to interpret the numbers. Our goal should be to close the gulf between the click through rates and the conversions. We need to constantly optimize our campaigns to get the maximum results. Therefore, it is better to take advantage of the skills of PPC experts in this field. By hiring a reliable PPC management service, we can have our PPC campaign regularly monitored and make the required changes to improve the performance. We do not have to do anything except to find the right service provider. Once you sign up with a PPC management service, they will take care of everything. This will be a worthwhile investment that you will make on your website’s online promotion. Some people who consider that this is an unnecessary expense and try to save on this investment end up losing a lot of money month after month on clicks that do not really matter. So hire PPC campaign management service and make your PPC campaigns bring the desired ROI.

If your web pages have too much of coding, then the file size too will exceed. When the files are too huge then the loading time will increase. Search engines love fast loading web pages as opposed to heavily laden websites. All these are just basics that we need to take in to consideration and using XHTML and CSS will help us in getting better web pages in terms of content to code ratio and in term of page loading time.
When you set out to optimize your pages first make sure the entire page and the codes can be parsed by the search engines. By throwing in too much of coding in the beginning the spiders will not be able to readily categorize your web page on any of the common categories. Different search engines will have different levels of tolerance to the content to code ratio issues. To be on the safest site, it is better to have your coding separated into your CSS files. This will leave your pages neat with the active content.

The above approach will leave your pages more organized and the search engines will be able to drill down to the end of the page and index the entire content. If you have all the codes on top, then the spiders will index your pages only partially.

XHTML clearly defines the elements of your web page for instance, using the h1 and h2 tags will tell the spiders that it is the title of the page rather than using just HTML formatting to make the text look like the title. You can define how exactly your title or the h1 line will look in your css file. This is just one aspect of your web page. If you similarly remove all the other elements using XHTML and css stylesheet, your page will look clean and uncluttered.

You can also use your CSS styling to create some special effects such as rollovers while retaining lower file size. You should make use of every little help that you can get to achieve your ranking in the search engines. You cannot afford to miss the finer details because these finer details will cost you a great deal.

A possible danger you encounter by following others is also that you end up with a basic set of sites all linking to the same people and here comes Google’s anti-spam team. Realtors networks have been wiped out, then ticketing network, al because they inadvertently used the same sites to link from.

Lateral, creative thinking is needed to get strong editorial links. A great strategy is to do things offline that you know will have some effect online. You can still offer products to bloggers to review - just be careful and don’t abuse this old and tested method! First, identify the regular bloggers in your vertical, then offer them something to review for your own market research purposes. Make sure to let them know you aren’t ‘payiong’ or ‘bribing’ them for a good review - you want brutal honesty in their review.

Do NOT ask for a link when you ask for the review. That way any links will be all on their side, adn you are not required to ‘no-follow’ them - plus, reverse psychology comes into play. Thsi sounds kind of at cross purposes from your real needs and wants, but the actual result will be that they review your product, they  generally try and be nice with constructive feedback (free tips on how to improve! no need to hire a consulting team!) - and often they fill out space by covering your other products.

On the other hand, if you go in asking for a link you’re more likely to get a blah post with a single link, because the blogger doesn’t think you really like their blog or style so why bother - you just want a link! Blogging works well in many B2C and B2B verticals to boost your profile.

Guess where the biggest and most powerful links come from? You get them from traditional media. Being newsworthy is the number one most powerful link building method there is, and this concept should heavily impact your lead generation process.

All the links won’t be keyword targeted - but quality can be through the roof when it comes to authority. Consider running your own news aggregator, and getting others to link to yo9u. Tie in social networks, and maybe you’ll go viral!

The idea behind Twitter is that less is more - and boy, is less more! When it comes to the enormous followings some individuals and companies have, the one hundred and forty character count limit makes brevity a virtue. Recently, internet marketers and SEOs have been discovering even more ways the power of a tweet can help their business.

Twitter asks ‘what are you doing right now’ - but really, no-one wants to hear you just took your Metamucil or are going out for a jog. The people who know what and when to post present them selves as highly interesting on twitter, and can develop a following of thousands of people who actively track what they say.

 Ashton and Demi, Oprah, Ellen and various other celebshave cracked the Twitter barrioer, nearly crashing the social app at times, as when Ashtone requested an ‘I love you’ sent to his wife from all his followers.

The four secrets to marketing with Twitter are as follows:

1. Seriously, we said it above, and will repeat it - don’t post everything you do! Stick with just the things that are interesting to others, and stuff you want others to see. News you want to spread the word about, info about an event that is happening, an alert for an offer you are presenting – things that will benefit and not bore your followers are best! Ask the question “is this beneficial information for my followers?” and don’t post if the answer isn’t yes.

2. Search twitter for others who have similar interests, or that you find fascinating, and follow them. When you follow another Twitterer, everything they post will go into your personal timeline. Youc an also retweet stuff they tweet and get it out to your own followers.  

3. Search for stuff posted on twitter through the free website Quotably. This site will show tweets in conversation mode and you can reply to people by logging in with your Twitter details.

4. Use a twitter agent and keep your essential twitter information close to hand and also plug your other social networks into Twitter - many have plugins that allow you to Tweet really important stuff automatically. The almighty Tweet is a powerful tool, and you can learn how to use it to develop your own contacts and business.

Along with our SEO efforts, we will also be having PPC campaigns and other paid promotions. When we streamline our SEO efforts, we will know when exactly we will need the additional paid efforts. At times, we may need a sudden surge of traffic to increase the sales. Therefore, we need to keep track of the effectiveness of our SEO so that we will know whether we will be able to get the required traffic for the desired period. On the other hand, if we do not know the nature of traffic that comes into our website and the nature of their movement within our website we can hardly make amendments to our website.

Moreover, timing is very crucial when it comes to SEO and its results. When we time them appropriately, we can get reliable results. For example rather than running directory submissions and article submissions at the same time we can use a linear scale for these services so that our website will tend to develop links in a more natural fashion. Sudden surge of links for any website will set off the alarm with the search engines. Therefore, to remain safe, it is best to have organic approach to our SEO. Search engines do not like manipulation of results through forced efforts. They want to create a fair online space for everyone and they want websites to deal with competition in a more healthy way rather than go for approaches that are against the ethical norms.

Sometimes we may not intentionally be using unethical SEO strategies but the efforts we are taking without keeping track of them may create such an effect. Therefore, this gives us yet another reason why we should streamline all our SEO efforts. We may want to use only legitimate approaches and since we don’t know how to channel all our efforts, we may be making use of multiple strategies that result in a sudden surge of links or exposure in bad neighborhoods etc. It is therefore not enough to spend money on our website’s SEO, it is very important that we make prudent efforts.

The nature of the forums are such that there is lot of room for duplicate content. We will have a number of links which have different linking text but the linking pages will be the same. For example, link text such as quotes, reply etc will lead to the same page. This can confuse the search engine bots. When search engine bots enter the same page through different links, it will consider that you have the same content in multiple pages. This can put you through duplicate content issues.

Make sure that you also use Robot.txt effectively to avoid search engine bots from reading unnecessary pages. When search engines find excessive content that are not related to your forum or your site, it will not be able to judge properly the essence of your website. This will affect the effectiveness of the keywords by diluting the keyword rich forum text with other content that are not relevant to the discussion or the site’s content. Pages such as user profiles, membership details etc., should be blocked from the search engines.

You can customize your script to incorporate meta tags including title tag as well as meta description tag. You can allow a certain number of characters in your post as meta description and write posts bearing in mind the head tag customization.
Though search engine bots can easily crawl tables, it may help to get rid of some of the tables so that the file size reduces with unwanted site architecture.

Also try to keep your header clean do not allow your CSS to eat up hundreds of lines. This will help the search engine bots to access the text easily and index the important content quickly rather than plough through hundreds of lines that are no way helpful on SEO counts.

Since your forum will be regularly updated, it should be frequently visited by the search engine bots. So get your sitemap ready as this is the only way to get search engines visit you frequently. Google has its own XML Sitemap; make use of this feature and get your site frequently crawled. Do not ignore pages with old discussion threads. Provide easy access to these pages. As long as these discussions are something to do with your site, they are useful.