• I’m Irritable Today •
• I Won’t Make The Oil Cartel Fat Cats Any Richer, No Siree! •

OK, I’m in a bit of an irritable mood this afternoon. Besides the fact that for the last 36-hours my ISP has been having intermittent connection problems, which not only has caused me to be unable to upload some huge video files that I need to provide to my partner Damian, it also affects my telephone service, because I use Vonage.  (Internet-based phone service is great, except when you don’t have an internet connection! )

All this bugs me.  I wasn’t able to accomplish everything I needed to do online yesterday or today, and of course I never know if I will get cut off in the middle of a phone conversation. My ISP tells me I have to wait until tomorrow when the “node” (whatever that is) will be fixed.

So, in keeping with my mood, I thought I’d totally digress from SEO issues and post a public statement to the world, letting you all know that I have begun to make my own quiet political statement against the awful gasoline prices.

I am not going to get into naming the actual public figures, nor the countries that I think are gouging us, taking advantage of us, and thumbing their noses at what the USA has done for them … and I am not going to mention the political figures that I think are despicable human beings and who are obviously laughing all the way to the bank every time one of us has to fuel up our vehicles.  Nope! I’m going to remain mum on those particular issues.

But hear me now!  I promise that from this point forward, I am going to do everything I can to use LESS GASOLINE.   I have decided one way I can achieve this is by curtailing my normal 40-mile round trip ventures up into town that I used to do about twice a week. Now I’ll consolidate all the little errands, shopping and everything else I usually take care of, and will only allow myself one stinkin’ trip a week into town.

I am going to be conscious of every darn drop of gasoline  I have to pump into my little 2-seater sports car, which by the way was pretty economical when I purchased it years ago and it still is. I get around 20mpg in the city and 34mpg on the highway. Not bad.

Anyway … there. I am doing my part to protest this awful situation.

I’m off my soapbox.  Thank you for listening.

• SEO Rankings Can Go Up … And They Can Go Down •
• There Is Usually One Of Three Basic Issues Affecting A Rankings Change •

I have been writing about how I am able to maintain top SEO rankings for the keyword phrase garden art project: read about it here.

At the time of that article (March 25, 2008), I held the #1 and #2 Google SERP positions. Today, I see I have the #2 and #3 positions, and also that the total number of SERPs (search engine result pages) that Google is showing has dropped significantly from 2.4 million to about 1.2 million.

Here is a screenshot I took a moment ago:

See what can happen in just a few weeks with rankings and other search engine results? The number of competing pages dropped significantly and I would have thought I’d have stayed up at the top with my ranking positions, but I haven’t.

But you know what? I’m not alarmed, nor really concerned, as little fluctuations can happen from time to time.  I will just sit back for now and see what happens within another week or two. If this competing website is still at #1, then I will make a decision as to what I need to do to try and attain the top spots again.

Trust me, I am not boo-hooing, as #2 and #3 are still WONDERFUL Google rankings to have.

Why Do Keyword Phrase Rankings Fluctuate?

You can pretty well bet there is more than one reason why my rankings, or yours, or anybody else’s may take a small nose dive, a huge drop, or on the positive side, a rise in the rankings from week to week, or month to month. Some of us refer to it as “The Rankings Roller Coaster”.

There is one thing you can be sure of, and that is this: NOTHING  is for sure in the search engine rankings wars! LOL  Just as in life, the ONLY thing for sure is that things are in a constant state of change. And this applies to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and all the other search engines as well.

The Three Main Reasons For SEO Ranking Fluctuations

The three basic reasons for drops or rises are either you’ve changed your site in some manner; competitors’ sites have changed; or the search engines’ algorithms changed. Be aware fluctuations can be one or a combination of these three.

To give you a little more insight, here’s a few more things to think about:

On-site issues :  Page content, products, file names, even the actual coding of your website might change every now and then, on down to daily or even hourly changes. (It all depends upon how you maintain your site.)  Anything can cause a slight or even drastic fluctuation in the rankings.

However, all being kept about the same as far as what you normally maintain and “do” on your site, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about if you dip down a notch or two.

But, if you’ve caused a coding error, or caused a glitch somewhere on your site, you might experience bigger search engine ranking problems.

Back-links (in-pointing) links :  There can be a change or drop in some good quality links that point to your website from other well-ranking websites. This is something we usually haven’t too much control over. This is also something that will happen to even the best of sites.

Hopefully you’ve not fallen prey to buying “link building” software or hiring companies that promise to get you high rankings by purchasing in-pointing links. Normally these are junk links and though you may see a spike in your rankings, it’s a short lived situation. You can also hurt your rankings by going after links from websites that are in non-related niches, or in “spam niches”, and the like.

Just keep pursuing good quality, links from relevant sites to help counteract the times when you do lose a back-link.

Server down time :  Sometimes SEO ranking drops may be due to nothing more than your website being inaccessible when the search engines try to spider your content. Usually a single instance of inaccessibility won’t affect your rankings. But, if your site is down repeatedly during crawl times … you have a serious issue that needs fixing quick!

Remember: If the search engine bots cannot spider your site when they show up at your front door, then they’ve got nothing to analyze for your ranking positions. The solution to this possibility is to have a good reliable web host provider.

A change in search algorithms :  This is one area that you and I have absolutely NO control over. Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the other SE’s have these very smart analytical-type employees sitting in their offices figuring out complicated mathematical formulas that instruct the search engines on how to process the terms you and I are searching for in relation to the gazillions of web pages filled with another gazillion subjects.  Whew … that was a mouth full!

In other words, it’s a well guarded secret as to exactly what factors are taken into consideration to deliver you or me good ranking positions. Don’t get me wrong … yes we can get a pretty good idea of what causes “good” rankings versus crummy or non-existent rankings, but the absolute answers are locked up somewhere in the search engine vaults! :) 

Suffice it to say it is true that the better the content and more theme oriented your website is, the better you will do in the rankings. And the better you’ve succeeded with your SEO optimization efforts, the better you will probably do in the rankings, too.

And then there is your competition :  If we could get rid of the competition, we’d all be in great shape! But seriously folks, new sites come onto the scene; other sites add new pages of quality content; maybe other sites gain a few more quality in-pointing links than you have; maybe a competitor starts paying better attention to their search engine optimization efforts than you are; maybe someone just wrote a couple of new articles using a keyword you didn’t have much competition for previously … the list goes on and on.

Do you get the idea of all the variables that can come into play when it comes to a drop (or rise) in search engine rankings?

I will be touching upon more of these issues in greater depth in future posts. But for now, I do hope you’ve gained some insight into the reasons for “the SEO rankings roller coaster” effect.

• Three Click Navigation Keeps Your Visitors Happy •
• More Than That And Most Likely It’ll Be “Bye-Bye” •

Here’s a very important rule I encourage you to always keep in mind when you are setting up your site’s HTML inter-linking structure: Remember It’s Gotta Be Three Clicks From Here-to-There.

This means that no matter where a visitor has entered your site, it shouldn’t take them more than three clicks to reach the information they’re looking for. It’s a well known fact that a large percentage of your site’s visitors are NOT going to be entering via your Home page. If you’ve done a good job of providing keyword focused content, many of the visitors will be coming into your site from a search engine.

On average, visitors are only willing to give you a three click chance to find what they are looking for, and if they can’t reach their target destination within those 3 all important clicks, you’ve lost them. Tah-tah … bye-bye.

Don’t Frustrate Your Visitors!

It is very frustrating to your visitors if they have to click through too many pages to get to the content they came hoping to find. Yes, you can argue that if they came from a search engine, then they are probably landing on a page that provides the information they were looking for.

But in many cases, they’re looking for more. Think about your experiences when searching for information. I don’t know about you, but I very often will seek out more info if I land on a site that has done a pretty good job of providing me what I’m looking for.

But if it is confusing to navigate the site, or it is too many clicks to get to other information that pertains to the subject I’m interested in … I’m gone.

Remember to make all the information on your site be no more than three clicks away from any point within your site. Providing multiple HTML linking paths throughout your site is encouraged. This can be achieved via your primary navigation, or through contextual hyperlinks within the content, even from the HTML site map you should have on your site.

The “three click rule” for HTML linking is yet another, important way for your site to be well received by those very much desired visitors.