One of my niches was doing very well, ranking two or three for my chosen keywords. This has been the way for several months until recently when I noticed a massive drop in traffic. My instinct told me to head to Google and search for my main keyword search – which I don’t even rank for anymore (well at least in the first 22 pages anyway).

So what do you do if (when?) this happens. My frist instinct was to change everything to try and rank again. However, the wisdom of the Internet says you shouldn’t do this. Any many cases, the best thing to do is wait. While this may seem counterintuitive, it’s best to make no major changes to your site for around a month. You should however, continue to add quality content and backlinks as you would normally do.

Over these weeks, take some time to do some SEO research as well as browse forums and other information sources to see what other people are experiencing. Remember, don’t make any major changes, simply use this time as a learning experience. However, SEO tweaks, site redesign and other minor tweaks can be employed to improve your site. If you’re unsure of the affect on your site, rather leave it. Try to document the changes you make, as you may need to reverse these at a later stage.

The next step is to diversify – find other niches, obtain other sources of traffic (PPC for example). Build other sites in other niches, optimise and build more.

If your site hasn’t returned to similar or close to the traffic levels before the Google slap, it may be time to optimise the site layout or recreate the site from scratch with new content or possibly a new domain.

Handy tip: use the search term site:www.yoursitename.com in Google – no results means you’ve been de-indexed (or if your site is relatively new, say less than a month old, has not been indexed by Google yet) and you may need to move your site to a new domain or start from scratch. Results returned means your site is still indexed by Google, which means you have a chance of ranking well again. Another handy tip – the site:www.yoursitename.com command shows the number of pages in the Google index. Try site:www.yoursitename.com -inallurl:www.yoursitename.com and compare this to the earlier result. The second command shows the number of pages in the Google main index and supplemental index, the second the number of pages in the Google main index. Your objective is to have as many pages in the main Google index, as pages in the supplemental index are not included in Google search results.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

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1. Write quality content

The number one rule for building traffic and visitors is by writing quality, unique content related to your niche. The search engines, including Google, love unique content and will reward you with top rankings. Along with the unique content make sure you optimize associated article titles, meta descriptions, H1 HTML tags and keywords. Many people however don’t have the time to write articles – in this case there are many people that offer article or content writing services -I would recommend starting with the Digital Point forums, specifically this forum. A word of warning though, there are many “fly-by-nights” so do your research and ensure the user has a good iTrader rating. Duplicate or non-unique content is disliked by the search engines and could decrease your PR or even worse the search engines (particularly Google) could de-index or sandbox your site, meaning that search engines effectively don’t even know your sites exist. Copyscape provides a limited, free service which enables you to ascertain the “uniqueness” of your content.

2. Build links

Arguably right up there with your unique content is your “link juice”. Google’s ranking algorithm, the set of rules which determine your position within search results, factors in the amount of links pointing to your site. Furthermore, Google’s algorithm factors in the quality of those sites that are linking to you. The PageRank (PR) ranging from a zero to a ten, determines how “important” Google thinks your site is, zero being not very important and 10 being the most important. For people with more money than time, there are people that offer link building services. Most offer social bookmarking links and directory submission services. In addition, one of the more expensive options is buying high PR links from blogs or site. In terms of value for money, the social bookmarking services is generally the best option to go with first, following by the directory submissions. Generally, the higher PR links are not worth it for starters, but may be considered further down the road.

3. Give it time and maintain the link and article building

Organic or natural traffic takes time, anywhere between a month to three months to gain some decent traffic. During this time it’s wise to continue to build links and write quality content. With regards to both content and link building, try to build then “naturally” – in other words, don’t build hundreds of links or create a mammoth amount of content at one time – search engines of frown upon this and your ranking may suffer. As your PR increases, so will your rankings and therefore traffic.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

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2. How will Google v 2 affect affiliates?
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