I feel sorry about what happened to this mom, Alice Seba. One of her websites, malcolmsweb.com, has been banned by Google, even though that website was full with good content. Since May 21, 2005, her visitors instantly dropped from about 700-800 per day to 200-250 per day.

There is an important lesson to be learned here. Never rely your business on the search engines. They’re unstable, always changing their algorithms. Instead, use the search engines only as ONE of your traffic sources and look for other traffic generation techniques to build multiple sources of traffic.

OK, to read Alice’s story, go visit her blog post, ‘Alice “White Hat” Seba Has Been Banned’.

Tags: Search Engine Marketing: SEM

In my previous post, I shared with you Jack Humphrey’s special report that shows us the fact that the search engines only constitute a small portion of his website’s traffic.

Now, I found another similar fact from Tinu Abayomi-Paul, the free traffic chick. In her blog post, “Site Promotion is Multi-Faceted”, she said that the search engines only constitute 6 - 10% of her traffic in any given month. While she didn’t tell us about the monthly amount of traffic to her website, I believe that her site gets huge traffic every month, because she has an Alexa ranking of 41,407 (that’s what my Alexa toolbar showed me at the time I wrote this post).

Tags: Search Engine Marketing: SEM

I wonder why some net marketers are too obsessed on getting top listings in the major search engines as if it is the only way to get targeted traffic to our website/blog.

I know that the major search engines are one of the biggest sources of targeted traffic in the net, but getting top listings in those engines is not the only way to get targeted traffic to our website/blog. And it can be quite tough and stressful to get high ranking in those engines, especially if you’re targeting crowded, competitive, keywords.

Jack Humphrey, the power linking guy, has given us a picture that it is possible to get huge amount of targeted traffic without the top listings in the major search engines. In his Special Report, “What if Google Didn’t Exist?”, he shared one of his sites’ stat in April 2004 and guess what? From 71,444 unique visitors that he got at that month, “google search” referred only a small portion of them, i.e. 0.07%.

This doesn’t mean that you should completely abandon your efforts on getting top listings in the major search engines. The purpose of this post is only to, borrowing Jack’s words, “help people relax about search engne marketing.”

Tags: Search Engine Marketing: SEM