As you can see from this list there were quite a few sites that are relatively well-known who suffered a huge ranking loss.  But the site that I want to focus on is EzineArticles.com.

I have always been a big proponent of writing original articles for distribution – most notably at EzineArticles.  They do bring me traffic and tend to get published on other sites around the web quite a bit.  I’m no Shakespeare but think I can hold my own pretty well when it comes to talking and writing about the topics that I do.

So when I noticed the HUGE drop in traffic [YIKES!] that EzineArticles received, it made me wonder if I should still at least at this time, recommend them as a traffic source for you.

Well, there’s good news and bad news on this front.  The good news is that EzineArticles has always been a good source of traffic for many people and as such, is still a recommendation by many online marketers – whether that recommendation is from 5 years ago or from 5 weeks ago.  The fact is, EzineArticles still has plenty of people recommending them. 

But, since their traffic has dropped so significantly the chances of you getting found within Google for your article at EzineArticles.com is now pretty much insignificant.

I actually wondered if maybe Google had made a mistake; after all, the algorithm changes are just computer programs.  Yes, they’re written by the brightest of the bright but the program itself is still just a…well…program.   While I can’t recall off of the top of my head exactly what the case was, I do seem to remember on one occasion or another of some sites getting caught in the crosshairs by mistake.

That said, I do believe that adding your articles to sites like EzineArticles is still a good idea, but at least at this point in time, the traffic that you will be getting will likely not be from the Google themselves.

I suggest that you take a look at your site logs and see how much of the traffic came directly from EzineArticles themselves and how much came from Google for the keyword you optimized your article for.  This will likely be a deciding factor in whether or not you choose to keep contributing content to them.

I further suggest that you also take a look at the response from Chris Knight, owner of EzineArticles to see what his take is on the whole situation.  It’s a fairly lengthy blog post but mainly from the over 400 comments that have already been made about their current situation.

All in all, it all comes down to traffic.  You need to determine for yourself and on a site by site basis, how well those articles have worked for you.

On a related note, quite a while ago I posted about the EzineArticles WordPress Plugin which allowed you to post articles directly from your own WordPress blog to EzineArticles.  At this point in time, they will no longer be allowing you to do so as noted in their blog post about Google’s algorithm update.

***** UPDATE 3/15/2011 *****

Shortly after I published this, Google’s Matt Cutts released a Google Webmaster Tools video about article marketing in general.  While he didn’t specifically mention EzineArticles, he did specifically speak to article marketing directories.  Here’s the video:

It first began when a variety of webmasters began to notice significant changes in their website traffic especially where long-tail keywords were concerned.

One site saw it’s traffic drop 50% over the course of a few days.

Another site saw 90% of it’s traffic disappear.

Some had smaller drops in traffic of around 10% while others saw no significant difference.

So what happened?

Initially when this was first discussed, it was simply a “theory” – but because it was happening on such a massive scale to so many sites, it soon became clear that something was happening although there wasn’t any official word from Google on what was actually going on.

Finally, after a few weeks, Google’s Matt Cutt’s did in fact, disclose that yes, there was an update to their algorithm that affected long-tail keywords and that this was a permanent algorithm change and it will not be rolled back.

Google doesn’t exactly tell us why some sites were affected and why some were not but Matt did re-iterate the same information he’s been giving for years. (see video below)

Matt states in his video “If you were affected by MayDay the sort of thing to think about is to go back and ask yourself ‘Have I got the highest quality site?’, ‘Am I showing up for the most relevant searches?’, ‘What sort of things can I do in terms of adding great content?’, ‘Am I making sure that people consider me an authority?’, that I’m not just matching something that’s off-topic or that users won’t find all that useful.”

So if you happened to see your site drop in rankings for some long-tail keyword search queries, take a look at who may be showing up for those search queries now.

• What are they doing differently that you could implement?
• Do they have more content?
• If so, what kind of content do they have?
• Where are they optimizing these long-tail keyword search phrases? And so on.

Make some changes on your own pages that you see some of your competitors doing and you might just see your listings start moving upwards yet again.

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The world wide web is a highly competitive market. Companies vie for the attention of billions of internet users in the search for better revenue. A lynch pin to the internet marketing war is the search engine.

Search engines are internet venues where billions of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are of course Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is phenomenal.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.

In order to maximize ranking and placement, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methos of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are (PPC) pay-per-click, adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

Getting   or trying to increase   website traffic requires  a plan and  regular effort. The rewards are definitely worth it.

Organic searches are searches conducted by web users in a search engine that is free from solicitations. A study from Jupiter Media stated that 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases originated from organic searches versus paid online ads.

This has made SEO much more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad but a method of intrinsically improving content.

Here are a few tips on improving content for a much more improved result in organic searches:

1.    Expertise. Follow your strengths. Sites you set up must be on subject you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.

2.    Plan the site. A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.

3.    Research. Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.

4.    Decide on important keywords. Decide on the most important keywords to use for your sight. Include these keywords in the metatags, copy page, page title, and file names.

5.    The Search Engine is your friend. Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.

6.    Focus. Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The rule is one topic per page.

7.    Join the directories. Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may shoot through the roof. Of course, make sure you know what you are talking about.

8.    Start a linking campaign. A most effective SEO method. This is a must to do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their sites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of its sites by the number of sites linked to it. 

9.    Repetition is the key to victory. Keep repeating the above tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.

In the world of search engine optimization, content matters a lot. If a site has amateur or worse falsified information, fewer and fewer visitors will want to visit it. They will spread bad news even faster than they spread good news, so expect a garbage site to be ignored even in a week’s time.

One of the keys to getting good rankings within the search engines is to determine how easy or how hard it will be to rank for a certain keyword phrase.

Oftentimes you’ll have a great keyword that you want to use on your site only to find out that you’re up against millions of competitors.

Or are you?

What I’m about to show you is A) completely free and B) will help you determine just exactly how easy or hard it will be to rank for a specific keyword phrase.

As an example, I’ll use the phrase that this post is about which is “Increase Website Traffic”.

If I head on over to Google and search on this phrase I see that I’m up against over 14 million websites.

Now at first glance that looks pretty darn competitive.  But, what I’m going to show you now is a way to determine just exactly how competitive that competition is really. Just because there’s over 14 million sites competing for that phrase doesn’t mean that all of those sites are of high quality or that they’ve used some very basic SEO techniques in order to be listed there.

To do that, I’m going to use a free tool called Traffic Travis.  You can download it for free by clicking this link.

Once you’ve downloaded the software and have it installed, open it up and click on “analyze keyword” under SEO analysis.

Next, enter in the phrase you want to rank for.  In this case, again, I’ll use “increase website traffic”.  Next, choose the location that you want to research.  I’m in the United States so I’ll keep it at it’s default level.  If you market to Australia for example, then you’d choose “Australia” and so on.

Finally click Analyze.

Traffic travis will go out and find the top 20 websites that appear in the search results along with a variety of information about those sites.

If there’s a checkmark it means “Yes”.  If there’s a red X it means “No”.

Once Traffic Travis is done analyzing your keyword it will give you an overall score for the keyword phrase.  From Difficult to Easy.  The more stars there are listed, the easier it will be to rank your site for the keyword you just searched on.

So if you remember, in the case of our keyword phrase of “increase web site traffic” Traffic Travis tells us that it will be relatively easy to rank well for this site – even though we’re up against over 14 million competitors.

The only thing we have to do is to be sure that we cover all of the bases that other web pages did not.

For example, a vast majority of these pages aren’t using the keyword phrase in the title of their web pages.  They’re also not using it in their descriptions or in an H1 tag on their site.  So we know that by being sure that we do, we vastly increase our chances of ranking better than these other sites.

The site in the second position has 124 backlinks to that web page.  If we can get close to or better than the same number of backlinks, we can increase the likelihood of our site getting ranked better even further.

Furthermore, if we can gather up some .edu and .gov domains to link to that page, this will even further increase our chances.

So there’s a quick tip on how to use this free software in order to quickly determine how easy it will be to rank well for a keyword phrase.

Now, Traffic Travis does have a premium version available which lets you track domains and keywords, etc., but for this purpose, you do not have to have the premium license to do so.

So the next time you think you’re up against a lot of competition and just simply couldn’t rank well for a keyword phrase, run it through Traffic Travis’ SEO analysis tool first to see what your competition really looks like.

Twitter is a website where you are able to update your status as frequently as you like. Your updates are restricted to 140 characters so Twitter as well as other sites that limit your updates to little bite-sized pieces of text are oftentimes called “micro-blogs”. The purpose of Twitter is to build your brand, interact with other people, share links, and simply grow your business.

Here are 7 easy steps to using Twitter.

1. The first thing you’ll want to do is set up a Twitter account if you haven’t already. Simply go to Twitter.com and click the green “Sign up Now” button. Enter some basic information about yourself and then create your account.
2. Next, set up your profile. Once you’re logged in, click on Settings at the top right of the page and then click on “account”. Add your name, your website address, your location, and most importantly a Bio about yourself. This bio will be one of the most crucial factors that help people decide to follow you and your updates or not. Tell people what you do and who you are. It’s confined to 160 characters so pull out your best written materials!
3. Third, click “picture” and add a profile picture preferably one of yourself. If you use the default icon that Twitter gives you this will limit the number of people who will follow you.
4. Fourth, Design your background by clicking on “Design”. If you’re just starting out, you can simply choose a default design that Twitter offers. However, you will eventually want a customized background for your business or website. There are many services online that allow you to do this free of charge.
5. Begin to make some status updates. What are you doing right now? What are you working on? Did you find an interesting link that you’d like to share? If you’re brand new to Twitter and don’t yet have many status updates (also called Tweets), or those status updates are nothing but attempting to sell something, you won’t get a lot of followers which is central to Twitter. Instead, post informative updates, interesting links, and anything else that you would like to share without having that link be self-serving.The more tweets you make at Twitter, and the more often you do so, the better the chances you have of getting more Twitter followers. Keep in mind that each tweet is limited to 140 characters so when you share a link especially, the characters in the link will be included in your 140 character limit.
6. Next, begin to get some followers for your new Twitter page. Click on “Find People” at the top right of the page then enter in a name in the search box. You can also connect to your Gmail, Yahoo or AOL email accounts and find people you may already know who are on Twitter. Additionally, if there are people whose websites you visit on a steady basis chances are they have a Twitter account. Visit their website or blog and look for a link to their Twitter account.
7. Finally, don’t be afraid to tell people you have a Twitter account. This will assist you in getting more Twitter followers.

The bottom line is with Twitter, is building trust first and then selling to those people later. No one wants to be marketed to all of the time so you ought to make your Twitter account something helpful to others first and foremost and make the helpful posts the bulk of your tweets. You can still market to your followers you just don’t want to make those the vast majority of your status updates.

BoneheadSEO is a website that gives you easy tutorials on how to get website traffic and learn SEO.