Death by SEO

I understand your situation.

Things become harder and harder when we chase the wrong things.

Soon, SEO will be gone as more and more factors in ranking will be developed that SEO peeps can't catch up.

The bottom line is, for you to rank higher, "provide quality and relevant content to users".

That factor will not change.

AdSense and SEO are completely different concepts. SEO gets you the traffic, AdSense is about the revenue. If you were monetizing through something other than AdSense, then the rules change around images wouldn't have been a problem.

Most good advice around SEO is pretty generic - provide lots of good, unique content. Use 'plain' HTML as much as possible. Use keywords at a reasonable frequency. Tag things appropriates. Use a linking structure that focuses in on the most important pages.

These types of statements transcend current SE rules, and even specific SEs themselves. Sure, a few minor details may change, but I have sites that haven't been touched in over a year which are still drawing plenty of traffic and even making decent AdSense revenue.

1)There is a lot more traffic out there than just Google.

2)If you keep losing your rankings you are probably doing it wrong. they make it clear what they want. Unique quality content structured in a logical format that is easy for users to find what they want. They serve the best results for any given term so give them what they want.

3)There will always be a 'system' to work with - Google or other. The plan should be to learn the system and work with it to increase your results.

Perfect answer James. It's about learning the system (not gaming the system, mind you and changing with the times.

Nothing in business stays the same - everything grows, expands, or changes to some degree and you need to adapt to keep up.

But I do get the frustration of having your crops wash away

Beyond a few basics, I don't even think about SEO. Here are the basics I use:

1) Complete all your META tags - individually for each page
2) Create a sitemap and submit it to Google. Remember to create and submit a new one each time you add or remove a page
3) Use your H1 and H2's properly and include your keywords or closely related words in each.
4) Avoid flash and scripts as far as possible
5) Use CSS with an external stylesheet
6) Run a PHP based RSS feed on an 'articles' or 'news' page - making sure the content it pulls in is totally relevant to the rest of your site. (PHP based because the SE's can read it - they can't read java based ones)
7) For every image link also include a text link with good anchor text
8) Complete all 'alt' tags for all images.
9) Link to it from wherever possible (Squidoo, Hubpages, profiles on the Social sites, etc)
10) That's it.

For a new site I sometimes set up a small PPC campaign to get things going but once I'm getting the same amount of traffic from the natural search results as the PPC I can the PPC campaign.

I find that my traffic levels usually stay pretty much constant once they've built up.

Hope that helps,

Cheers,

Martin.

you just need good and useful content laid out in the right way. that will always be favored by SEs

Focus on marketing and promotion.

Guest blog, write articles, link bait.

Create really good articles, and let others publish it. Get into authority sites in your niche. You reach the audience and build link popularity at the same time.

I agree that if you constantly worry about changes in algorithms, you are doing something very wrong, more in the blackhat area than white.

the key is working on traffic generation methods

spread you traffic methods around so when one drys up another is still working having your eggs in one basket is wrong

here is a thread that has so many ways of driving traffic if you tried to do them all you would not have enough time

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-here-now.html

Ed