Perhaps you have made some efforts to improve the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your web site, but it isn’t working well and you still aren’t receiving much search traffic.

Here are a few potential reasons why your SEO isn’t working.

1. Outdated Methods – The effectiveness of different techniques changes from year to year, and some are no longer useful. You should consider researching newer methods of conducting SEO if your techniques include things like putting a hundred different words in the “keywords” META tag, purchasing links on pages that aren’t related to your site in any way, or commenting on blogs that now use the “nofollow” attribute. Certain outdated techniques, like putting a long list of keywords at the end of the page (typically in a very small font) or posting to FFA (Free For All) link pages, can actually worsen a site’s position in search results instead of improving it.

2. Not Enough Time -Even if your techniques are correct, another one of the reasons why your SEO campaign may not be working is because you don’t spend enough time on it. SEO shouldn’t be viewed as an afterthought; efforts to design and create content for a web site are wasted if it receives little or no traffic. There are numerous important tasks associated with SEO; optimizing URLs and META tags, obtaining inbound links, researching keywords, improving keyword density, submitting to directories, creating a site map, and so on. Many companies pay marketing firms to carry out SEO work, thus saving time and ensuring that effective techniques are applied.

3. Too Impatient – One of the reasons why your SEO efforts might seem not to be working is that you haven’t waited long enough to see an effect. Search engines need to index pages, find new links, update rankings, and so on – which doesn’t happen immediately. It typically takes longer (especially for new web sites) to see results from SEO on Google than MSN, Live.com, or GigaBlast. Submitting a new site to the major engines can help expedite the results a bit. If it is your goal to start receiving traffic immediately, consider using a different promotional method like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or paid inclusion until your SEO campaign starts working effectively.

After identifying and responding to the reasons why your SEO isn’t working, you will have a better chance of achieving high rankings in search results and gaining more traffic to your web site.  If you would like a professional review of your website, check out our Website SEO Audit service.

After a successful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaign, which has put your web site in a top position for one or more valuable keywords, it remains important to defend these keyword rankings from being lost to other sites. This is especially relevant for desirable keywords which numerous well-optimized sites compete for. Read on for several tips about how to defend your SEO position.

1. Keep track of changing search engine algorithms and policies. It will become harder to defend your site’s position in results if some of the SEO techniques used to promote it become outdated, or if new techniques are not being utilized.

2. Use care when making any changes to your site, taking into account how they might possibly harm its SEO position. Consider adding new pages to hold more information, rather than placing the information on existing pages. Remember to make sure the keyword density isn’t affected by changes.

3. Occasionally check any inbound links to your site on other major web sites, to make sure they still exist. If one is missing, try to gain a link on another equivalently popular site before the next PageRank update from Google. This will defend your level of inbound links from falling behind.

4. Register or purchase similar/related domain names, especially keyword-containing domains which are favorable for SEO purposes. This will help defend your position by preventing other sites from using these domains, and you can also utilize them to benefit your own promotional efforts.

5. Try to match any legitimate SEO oriented marketing techniques competing sites start to engage in, such as social bookmarking promotion. In some cases this may be expensive; a competitor might pay to get listed in the Yahoo Directory, thus gaining a significant advantage in their SEO position.

6. If your site links to any web sites competing for the same keyword position, consider using the “nofollow” attribute in these links. This will prevent such sites from gaining an increased search ranking because of your links to them.

It is imperative to remain vigilant against the potential loss of a favorable ranking for a particular keyword, rather than entirely ignoring such efforts after gaining a good position. If eventually you can no longer defend the SEO position for a particular keyword, try to optimize for a different keyword which is relatively popular but has less competition to defend against.

When calculating your site’s ranking in search results, search engines consider several factors, one being the quantity and quality of the links pointing to your site. If you have an affiliate program chances are you have a lot of links from you affiliate sites pointing to yours. The question is how do this affiliate links affect your SEO efforts.

There are two ways affiliate sites can point to yours. The first is network-wide sites that first point to the affiliate administrator’s server and then redirects to your merchant site. The second is affiliate network solutions that directly link to your merchant site. These links help track click-through and conversion rates so that commissions can be paid to your affiliates. So if you have thousands of affiliates, you’ll have thousands of back links. However, with search engines that consider link popularity in their ranking algorithms these affiliate links don’t count for your rankings.

There are newer affiliate programs and networks that help merchants get some value from these links, but these programs do have some risk. For example, Google watches how fast new links to a site appear. They use this to detect and penalize search engine spam. If Google sees too many new links in too short of a timeframe they will penalize or possibly ban the site. Google also watches how many new links have identical anchor text. This aids them in finding what they consider to be search engine spam.

While it is important to receive credit for your backlinks, what you want to keep in mind is the quality of these links rather than the quantity. Therefore, take your time when creating backlinks, even within your affiliate sites. This way you can receive credit where credit is due and not worry about your site being penalized or banned by they major search engines.

Alexa.com ranks web sites based on how popular they are, with sites like Yahoo, MSN, Google, and eBay in the top twenty, and many others ranked among the thousands or millions. Good Alexa ratings can be of significant value in helping web sites gain advertisers and is also of value for comparing how popular similar web sites are.

To check your site’s Alexa ranking, visit alexa.com and click the “Traffic Ranking” tab near the top of the screen. Then enter the web site URL. The next page should show a screenshot of its home page, its popularity ranking, trends regarding traffic increases or decreases, which countries it is the most popular in, and other information. While ratings like 450,000 or 873,000 may seem poor to people unfamiliar with Alexa, they are actually fairly good; many millions of web sites are ranked by Alexa. Some or all of this information, including the traffic ratings, may not be available for relatively new or little-known web sites. If the home page screen shot is outdated, there is a way to request that Alexa update it; see their help section for details.

Alexa determines traffic ratings for web sites by monitoring the sites visited by people using their optional toolbar software, so their rating may or may not be an accurate reflection of how popular a web site is. The toolbar requires users to have Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Firefox for a browser, so visitors with Apple, Linux, or DOS operating systems are never counted in the ratings. Also, IE 6.0 requires at least Windows 98. This puts web sites which cater to an audience with older computer systems or alternative operating systems at a disadvantage. The ratings are of little value or importance to sites which lack advertising or use services like Google Adsense or Yahoo! Publisher Network to generate advertising revenue.

Overall, while good Alexa ratings are of value and importance to some, they are not absolutely necessary for gaining advertisers. A web site’s Google PageRank and rankings on other traffic ranking systems (ranking.com, quantcast.com) might also be considered, and advertisers can be provided with information from the site’s own statistics as well. If your web site has a good Alexa ranking, this can be of great value and should be pointed out; if not, point to different statistics, and keep in mind that some advertisers may not have even heard of Alexa.