Online business is a game of sorts. You are competing against others in your niche for customers and their dollars.
There are only so many "winners" in the game within a niche. When enough competing businesses divide up the available customer dollars, at times, the niche can become saturated with a excess number of players.
When the "pie" (customer purchases in a given niche and time period) or prize is divided up, too many sellers can mean a small share for each winner - sometimes not enough revenue to justify the work that is going into the business.
Of the many challenges that an online solo business owner faces in growing and maintaining a business, few are as exasperating as finding that previous work you have done has been wiped out (for some reason) through no fault of the owner.
Online business owners are in the game of creating enticing offers for their products and services (or affiliate products), driving web traffic to those offers, and hopefully converting the prospects who come to the offers into paying customers.
But that's only a fraction of what the owner must successfully accomplish. Once customers are in hand, there is a constant effort needed to turn those customers into repeat, loyal buyers of other products that the owner makes available.
Of course, anyone who has been involved in online business understands that there are many revenue models available to the owner. Nearly all of them are reliant upon the business being able to attract a constant stream of prospects from all over the Internet.
Getting traffic to your website is critical; and the more, the better!
Most owners build a network of information "tidbits" and spread them over the locations where their targeted prospects can be found. These tidbits often include articles, reports, ebooks, videos, interviews, banners, advertising on other sites, forum posts, Adwords and Adsense campaigns, and many other traffic generators.
The tidbits that are placed in locations where prospects will find them include links back to the business web site. The idea is that the prospect will be enticed to want to see what the business owner offers in the niche that is of interest.
All of these tidbits (really advertising for the business owner) are designed to send the business traffic and they do that be being ranked highly in the search engines. The higher an ad is ranked by Google, Yahoo, or Bing/MSN (or other search engines), the more traffic it is likely to drive back to the business owner's offers.
The challenge for the business owner is that the formula for getting content tidbits ranked high in the search engines keeps changing. Google, the largest and most important engine, does not disclose to the public exactly how it's rankings are derived.
Not only that, Google changes it's methodology for ranking (called an "algorithm) quite often. There is much speculation about why Google does this.
My own feeling is that Google is attempting to draw as much revenue from the public as possible. Google wants to attract paid advertising which occupies the highest ranking placements on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
In addition, Google doesn't want the public to "game" their ranking system; hence, they change the the way they determine rankings every so often.
Web advertisers and webmasters refer to this strategy as "the Google Dance."
Revenue from paid advertising has been on the rise for years and Google is doing everything it can to maximize it's "take" or share of that pie.
There is some debate among advertisers and business owners about who suffers from the effects of the Google Dance, but it has hit many unsuspecting webmasters and has crushed some online businesses.
When content and ad placements drop (or are no where to be found) business income can evaporate almost over night. The dreaded Google Dance has been blamed for many businesses going out of business in a heartbeat.
So the strategy to avoid the Google Dance and withstand the "Google slap" of your previous work to get high rankings includes:
1. Publish as much high quality targeted content (tidbits or every kind) as you can. You never know what Google will "downgrade" or drop from its rankings at any given time. If you have hundreds or thousands of pieces of content spread all over your niche, your chances of surviving "the dance" without major income reduction will be enhanced.
2. Publish most of your content on static pages. Good quality stand alone content has a good chance of staying put and growing the amount of traffic to your site over time. Advertising and other people's websites can be dropped from the rankings quickly or downgraded in importance.
3. Try to get your content syndicated if possible. If you can get many other web sites to post your content, the chances are pretty fair that Google's actions will be less destructive than if you keep everything on your site or in just a few places.
4. Be sure to use targeted keywords in your articles, reports, ebooks, advertising, videos, etc. As you do, your content will be seen as a better fit for higher search engine placement by the search engines. Your offerings will be relevant, less likely to be considered SPAM, and more easily categorized.
5. Use HTML tags and put the title or summary of your content within them. The search engines recognize the tags and know that they are there to set off your main ideas or title. The approach we suggest is to learn as much as you can about what is preferred by the search engines and then give them what they want. In this way, you are less likely to be "danced upon" or slapped.
6. Work to increase the backlinks to your web site. The Google ranking formula places much importance on the number and quality of links coming into your web site. If lots of other relevant (to your niche) high ranking sites are linking to yours, Google will rank the quality and importance of your site higher.
7. Set up traffic tracking on your web site. In order for you to play the search engine game at a high level of confidence, it is important to know how much traffic you're getting, where it's coming from, and what it does once it's on your site. Google Analytics (and many other free and paid traffic analysis software applications) help you to break down your site traffic so you can see what's working and what's not.
8. Make quality content an ongoing "must do" execution in your business. Google likes constantly update web sites. They don't like to see old and never-changed pages. "Dripping content" refers to publishing one page after another in a steady constant manner (which is good) compared to dumping large amounts of content all at once (not as good).
When you think about it, most abandoned web sites are never taken down. I'm guessing there is a lot of "stale" material sitting and collecting dust in cyberspace. It might be really shocking if there was a way to know just what percentage of the world wide web is trash left over from a previous venture that no one cares for any longer.
Hopefully, if you follow these logical steps you will keep your content ranked highly in the search engines and be able to withstand the Google Dance when it comes along again.
