In This Issue:

• Google Rankings Change

• How To Choose Your Link Partners

• ExactSeek Gaining Popularity Fast
   

Google Rankings Change

On Friday, 21st November, Google decided to tighten its site ranking algorithm. All hell broke loose as tens of thousands of sites disappeared from positions they had held (in some cases) for years. We noticed some of our client sites plummeting for their major key phrase from being #1 to total invisibility. Yet this was only in highly competitive areas (such terms as 'Fredericksburg' and 'bed and breakfast'), not for their secondary phrases. These sites were, in most cases, not highly optimized, had not sought reciprocal links but had achieved their rankings through being on the web for 4 or 5 years. In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories.

Google's changes have given priority to lodging directories and destination guides at the expense of independent hotel or inn Web sites. Google's results are more likely to produce an interior page of a large portal than the homepage of an individual property.

"What should we do?" is a common question. The long-term answer is to make sure you have a site your visitors will love and other site owners will want to link to. For the short-term, don't rush to change your site. The consensus amongst the experts seems to be: don't panic and rush to undo anything. Wait to see what happens when Google settles down. Google isn't done making changes. The last major update at Google took several months to stabilize. It always has been, and always will be, about making your site the most informative, user-friendly, and content-rich it can be.

Now is the time to create a plan to diversify the sources of traffic for your site. Don't depend on traffic from the free listings in search engines. As many have experienced, it can disappear without notice. Visitors to your site should come from many different areas of the Internet (paid listings, search engines, industry directories, links from other sites, etc.). If you have an accommodations site, now would be a good time to join such directories as Lodging in Texas .

How To Choose Your Link Partners

1. To Get More Traffic To Our Web Sites:

People just love to follow links on the Internet. They love to poke around and follow their interests. If your site is well placed on link pages around the Internet you can definitely expect some additional traffic from these links.

Keeping this in mind. When you are reviewing the site of a potential link partner, take a look at how that site displays the links. If the links are haphazardly arranged - 200 links on one page with no apparent order - your chances of getting traffic is reduced. Look at the possible placement of your link, and judge it from the standpoint of visibility and its capacity to generate traffic to your site.

2. To Add Value To Your Web Site:

Your Web site is valuable to your visitors if it provides information they need. The links you provide can also make your site an important source of information and a convenient place for people to visit and revisit. Accordingly, choose your links from the standpoint of satisfying the needs of your clientele. Do the products or services look shoddy or below the standard of your Web site? If so, then do not go after the link. Is the product or service completely unrelated to your Web site? If so, then it doesn't really add much to the site.

3. To Build Link Popularity and Boost Ranking in Search Engine Results:

Results in search engine queries are determined by the material you have presented on your Web page, and by other off-page factors, such as, how many other sites link to your site. The concept of link popularity got a huge boost from Google whose PageRank system not only weighs the number of links that point to your site, but also the quality of those incoming links. Sites linked into your site from the same industry receive more credit than links from a site in an unrelated industry.

ExactSeek Gaining Popularity Fast

Within the next 30 - 45 days, an additional 2 to 3 million site listings will be added to the ExactSeek database. Their goal is to make ExactSeek a quality site listings numbering around 5 million. Their popularity and importance have increased very, very fast.

ExactSeek offers an affordable paid inclusion program that provides small site owners with unmatched benefits. For $12 or less, you get an attractive google-type ad box (like the one below) with guaranteed Top 10 exposure across 6 search engines for 3 months. No pay-per-click, no recurring charges, no problems - just one low flat fee.