I have consulted small home businesses & start-up organizations on in-out media & how to leverage the powers & reach of blogs. Over a period of time, I noticed that bloggers & webmasters are prone to 5 extremely common mistakes . They are often so subtle that you don’t realize the effect until you see your traffic dropping steadily.

The purpose of this post is to highlight those 5 extremely common, and often silly, errors & mistakes that bloggers & webmasters commit. My approach on the analysis is outward-in, which means I shall analyze the mistakes by looking at why your traffic is dropping. Another indicator is the hit counter statistics that shows how many hits (referral, or search engines or direct hits) your website is getting.

The major indicator that something has gone wrong is a drop in hits from search engines . The most common reason is that your content is not shown within the first couple of pages in search results. Content aside, there is a possibility that there is a problem somewhere. I would assume that your website is fairly optimized for search engines (that is, it has proper META tags & relevant indexes in the Header).

Problem 1: Corrupted Sitemaps - sitemaps are files that you create to reside on your domain, that tells search spiders like Google Search Bots or Yahoo! Search Engines etc, what & where to look for in your website. There are various plugins that are available to update your sitemap file upon any changes to your content. In case your sitemap file is corrupted, none of the search engine spiders will be able to read it. Over a period of time, your sites & pages will start to lag behind in search results.

Fix for the problem: Google Analytics report will tell you if your sitemaps have problems. Once you notice a problem, the best & the quickest thing is to replace the sitemap file with a new one. Once you replace your sitemap file, go back to your Google Analytics / Webmaster page & set the Google bot to crawl your website again.

Problem 2: Site Verification Problem - this is a rather nasty problem. Once you set your website, webmasters often register the website with Google & Google verifies the ownership of the website. If subsequently, your website is seen to promote spam or malware, Google would tag your website in a black list. Any black listed website will either not be added to search databases or removed from them making it impossible for people to find your website or blog through content searches.

Fix for the problem: This is a tricky situation. There are many ways in which your domain could be mal-used by internet scammers & spammers that could lead to being black listed. There are 2 things that should be done immediately, but there is no guarantee that this problem would be resolved quickly!

One - Take a look at your domain’s log (provided by your domain hosting service provider) & examine the data for abnormal activities & hits . Also look for signs of hacking especially your email server. We often tend to leave the SMTP email servers unsecured, allowing anybody to send emails off your SMTP domain. This is the most common way spammers use & you, as the domain owner, have to pay the price. Contact your domain hosting service provider’s help desk immediately & let them know that you have been hacked.

Two - Download your web log & contact the Google (or any other search engine provider) team immediately with a copy of the log . Request for an investigation. But there is a high probability that your request may not be honored or it may take months before you hear back. When my domain was hacked, I heard back from Google after 3 months!

Problem Three: Hosting Service Unavailable - in this situation, your domain hosting service provider, that hosts your websites & blogs, are not available round the clock. You would continue to miss visitors who type in your web address only to see "server not found" message. But in the worst case, search bots who were crawling the internet at that time would not be able to index your website. If this happens continuously, your website loses priority in the search databases.

Fix for the problem: The fix for this problem comes in 2 parts (1) verify if your hosting service is really bad. If you have to weigh between the price you pay for hosting your domain to the server availability time, you should get an uptime of over 95% for a price of about USD 3.00 a month hosting. If you need higher uptime, you have to host your sites & blogs on a better provider. I have used a combination of hosts to make sure that I am covered in case one of them fails to deliver good uptime.

Look at my post on the various affordable hosts. You need to choose between cost, bandwidth & availability. I have posted a detailed description on Web Hosting Services page.

• Web Hosting - $6.95/mo!
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• Moo FatCow $88 Plan !
• 1500GB of Storage &15TB of Bandwidth for only $6.95
• ImHosted.com Web Hosting

As part (2) set up a free web monitoring services. Plenty such services are available & they will email you whenever your website is down (not available error report) & again when your website is back up (recovery report). Sometimes, the specific hardware where your domain & website codes are placed have problems & you can work out a solution with the hosting service provider to move your domain onto a better "mount". If you do not see any improvement, you may have to switch to another better host. I have mentioned a few above. I have used their services & they offer you reliability, stability & peace of mind for an additional buck or two.

Problem Four: URL change - this problem occurs when you change the way your files, web pages & posts are organized in a way to impact the URL. As an example, if you had a page URL like http://www.mydomain.com/my_pages/this_page.html & you moved this_page.html under a new folder called new_pages, your new URL will be http://www.mydomain.com/new_pages/this_page.html. Search engines that have already indexed the page as under my_pages, will continue to show it that way for several months. Users who click on that link from search results or bookmarks, will land on an error page! That’s a bad experience. How many times have you visited an error page & got frustrated?

Fix for the problem: The first option is not to change the way URLs are constructed. This is specially important for bloggers who continue to change, delete & rename tags & category names. Blog posts are also organized under tags & categories & any change to them would lead to a 404 Error! In case you must change, regenerate the sitemap & robot.txt files again & use the Google Webmaster page to request a fresh spidering. That apart, submit to all the search engines for a few months to minimize the number of old URLs in cache.

I have compiled a list of search engines that you could submit your sites & blogs for free.

• Search Engine Submit

Problem Five - Duplicate contents - if your website contains too much of duplicate contents, copied from other more authoritative websites, search engines will gradually demote your website. This will also happen if your website is just comprised of links & advertisements. Without a strong, original content, your website or blog is of no interest to search engines.
Fix for the problem: The fix for this problem is rather easy. Produce & publish good, original content. Usage of keywords & phrases that align to your website’s core purpose helps build your status in the world of search engines. Look carefully at your links. It is important that you link to other good websites, but it is also important that other good websites link to you. You may want to eliminate the link exchange offers from general copy cat publishers too.

So those were the most frequently encountered mistakes that a publisher, webmaster or a blogger could make. These mistakes prove costly over a period of time & knowing what they are & tips on how to prevent them could help you build an increasing traffic from search engines.

Find more Internet Money Making Tips in: Blogging Tips, Internet, Optimization, Search Engines, SEO, Web Hosting

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