Welcome back, feel free to comment!

Got Google Slapped, Bombed, Nuked, Poked or Whatever?

Google is one of the most used search engines and many, many internet marketers make a living with Google. Here’s the good and bad thing about Google – Google updates regularly.

It’s good because it stays relevant to the global market by updating its’ search algorithms. It’s not-so-good because people who rely heavily on Google may find that the work they’ve been doing for the past few months going straight down the search engine result pages (SERP) from page 1 to God-knows-where.

So how can you be unaffected by the changes in Google? Simple: Apply the same strategies as what the financial markets are doing – diversify.

I believe there are 3 types of traffic (either paid or free) – search, content and directed.

  • Search traffic is based on using using search engines to generate targeted traffic to your site, like using pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine optimization (SEO).
  • Content traffic is using contents like articles and blogs (also SEO) so that people can find you on the search engines based on your content – not exactly the title or what the actual content was targeting at.
  • Directed traffic is like sending people to a site based on a recommendation. Emails and various other microblogging sites like Twitter get people to visit a site with a link provided.

Diversify your marketing methods – don’t over rely too much on one form of traffic in order to get people to visit your website. There will be some that outperform others but the key is to spread out your risks (in financial terms) and use as many methods so that when there’s a change in the search engine algorithms, you can still get a percentage of your regular traffic from other sources.

Most people use search and content traffic to direct traffic to their sites. People who have wisely built up a list of people can make use of directed traffic. A list is a powerful tool to use and should never be abused – because the people in your list are real people. Remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would them do unto you” (or whichever spinoff of that phrase).

Anyway, let’s dive a little deeper into each.

Search Traffic

SEO is a free method of getting traffic which many people use to get their websites found by search engines – making use of meta tags can help with that process. Blogs are also something that search engines love – it’s kind of like search engine candy. Based on what I’ve come across and the various views on blogging by different experts, WordPress seems to be the winner as the best blogging platform – either free or self hosted.

The problem with using search traffic is that it relies heavily on the search algorithms. While there are testimonials that report “Wow! I made Google’s page 1 in my first day!“, they often leave out the report that they dropped from the SERP the next day. The search engines strive to provide the best search results for their users so if someone else has a better result for the same question, the engine will likely rank it higher.

That can be reliant on the content’s age, relevancy or authority. Authority happens when other people link to that website or article – if a website or article has got sites pointing to it, Google tends to give that site an advantage over another site that has no site linking to it.

PPC is a marketing method used by many to drive people to their website – either in search or content sponsored links. If you do a search right now on home business, you’ll see that there are sponsored links to the right and at the top. These are people who paid to be shown in the SERPs.

These are people who are making use of search PPC. Content PPC is what you see on various blogs and article directories that show Adsense ads. How much you pay for your ads is reliant on the competition as well as the quality score of your landing pages. Read the Google help files about quality score for more information or you can read this case study about quality score to help you in your ad costs.

Content Traffic

Creating contents is a great way to get traffic. Contents can be created in many forms: articles, blog posts, audio podcasts, video, ebooks, teleseminars, webinars, et cetera.

When creating text content, there are ways to make it more appealing to search engines as well as people – use of the Header tags help search engines. Next, as graphics are something that humans can see but search engines still view it as binary code in 1s and 0s (for now), they will have to rely on text such as the filename, title and alternate tags help qualify whether it’s relevant.

When it comes to audio and video contents, since search engines aren’t able to find out what the contents of the video and audio are (again, yet!), they rely heavily on tags.

So, creating an audio or video content with the right tags is especially important to get found by people and search engines. For example, if you do a search for Final Fantasy (a very popular game) and you view the video results, you’ll notice that they tagged the videos with the words Final Fantasy.

Case in point, the videos that are shown are Final Fantasy X and a symphony playing Final Fantasy VII’s “One Winged Angel“. There were previous other versions of Final Fantasy but it wasn’t until they got tagged that people found them.

Content search sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, delicious also help the end user because when people search for terms in those sites, they get relevant results based on what other people have found – not results that are machine generated.

Directed Traffic

This form of traffic is reliant on factors such as authority, mystery, relevancy, trust level, recommendation, et cetera. For businesses that took the initiative to create a list of prospects and buyers, this is a great way to create traffic. Also, directed traffic may also be based on a friend’s recommendation like “Hey, check this site out“.

This form of traffic is unaffected by the search engines as it relies on sending emails to people’s inbox and get them to visit a certain site. Autoresponders such as GetResponse and AWeber are often used by starting business owners. Higher end business owners often use more complex email delivering systems such as InfusionSoft.

The problem that people face with using autoresponders is having to deal with Spam filters, the CAN-SPAM Act and deliverability issues. Words such as free, million dollars, et cetera are often filtered out by spam filters to help protect the user.

Building a list of subscribers, prospects and buyers is all about relationship building between the person and the business. A business may have a product update to interested parties with one email. People who have a list of buyers may want to keep in touch with them because people who have bought something are quite likely to buy from you again.

Divide and Conquer

If you use any of these methods to drive traffic to your site (and very likely, you did in one form or another), you should try looking into various forms of traffic generation.

If you rely on Google Adwords to drive traffic and Google increases the cost of your ads exponentially (AKA Google Slap) but you were away for a couple of days with no access to a computer, you may have lost precious business or sales.

If you rely on search engine traffic and use SEO heavily, but you find that you get dropped off the search engine pages (sandboxed or banned), it takes as long (or possibly longer) to get back into the SERPs. If your site got banned, you’re better off getting a totally new website rather than trying to restore it.

If you rely heavily on emails, what if the user didn’t open up his email inbox? Or if the user already has tons of other emails in his inbox? You’ll be competiting against all the other emails that he receives.

Each of these methods of driving traffic are great – but they each have their own flaws. Use various traffic strategies to cover the loopholes that the other traffic strategy has. None of these marketing methods are perfect. Use of more than one traffic method will help your business or website to be unaffected by whatever changes and updates the search engines go through.

Tagged with: • • • • • •

Filed under: Articles • Email Marketing • Other Useful Tips • SEO • Video • Work From Home Strategies

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!