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With large drops, be wary against making a judgment call until at least a few days have passed.

Ranking algorithms fluctuate, competitors gain and lose links (and on-page optimization tactics) and search engines even flux between indices (and may sometimes even make mistakes in their crawling, inclusion or ranking processes).

Gaining or losing rankings for a particular term/phrase or even several happens millions of times a day to millions of pages and is generally nothing to be concerned about.

Google Insights for Search Available at google.com/insights/search - this tool provides data about regional usage, popularity and related queries for keywords.

Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an essential metric for monitoring overall SEO performance.

The keywords that send traffic are another important piece of your analytics pie.

Inclusion is a privilege, not a right, so be cautious

When users share your content on Google+ with the +1 button, this activity is often annotated in search results.

Find directories or listings of relevant resources.

Earning the attention of the press, bloggers and news media is an effective, time honored way to earn links. Sometimes this is as simple as giving away something for free, releasing a great new product, or stating something controversial.

Earning the attention of the press, bloggers and news media is an effective, time honored way to earn links.

Search for sites like yours by using keywords and phrases directly relevant to your business.

leverages aspects of usefulness, information dissemination, or humor to create a viral effect

Build a company blog. Make it a valuable, informative and entertaining resource.

Check out this post on E-commerce links for more.

If you have partners you work with regularly or loyal customers that love your brand, you can use this to your advantage by sending out partnership badges

Potential Referral Traffic Link building should never be solely about search engines. Links that send high amounts of direct click-through traffic not only tend to provide better search engine value for rankings, but also send targeted, valuable visitors to your site

if you are trying to rank for the phrase "dog kennel", earning links from pages that already rank for this phrase would help significantly.

Self-Created, Non-Editorial Hundreds of thousands of websites offer any visitor the opportunity to create links through guest book signings, forum signatures, blog comments, or user profiles. These links offer the lowest value, but can, in aggregate, still have an impact for some sites.

Manual "Outreach" Link Building The SEO creates these links by emailing bloggers for links, submitting sites to directories, or paying for listings of any kind.

"Natural" Editorial Links Links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your content or company. These links require no specific action from the SEO, other than the creation of worthy material (great content) and the ability to create awareness about it.

"Natural" Editorial Links Links that are given naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your content or company. These links require no specific action from the SEO, other than the creation of worthy material

Shares the Same as Links In a word, no. Although there is evidence that social shares such as Tweets, Likes, and Plusses effect rankings, at this time links are considered a far superior and more lasting way to promote the popularity of your content than any other method.

Those with large social circles, who share a lot of material, are more likely to see that material (and their face) promoted in search results. For publishers, this means its beneficial to have your content shared by these same highly influential folks with large social followings. For Google in particular, this is especially true of content shared on Google+.

search engines treat socially shared links differently than other types of links, they notice them nonetheless.

Link signals tend to decay over time.

Universities, government websites and non-profit organizations represent examples of high-trust domains.

One of the strongest signals the engines use in rankings is anchor text. If dozens of links point to a page with the right keywords, that page has a very good probability of ranking well for the targeted phrase in that anchor text.

links from sites within a topic-specific community matter more than links from general or off-topic sites.

The more popular and important a site is, the more links from that site matter.

Through links, engines can not only analyze the popularity of a website & page based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, but also metrics like trust, spam, and authority. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sources

useful content is critical to search engine optimization. Every search performed at the engines comes with an intent - to find, learn, solve, buy, fix, treat, or understand.

(and algorithmically valuable) collection of links. The timing, source, anchor text, and number of links to the new site are all factored into its potential performance (i.e., ranking) for relevant queries at the engines.

In 2011 Google introduced the Panda Update

Engagement Metrics

Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content

kinds of pages and sites that satisfy their searchers. Generally, these sites have several traits in common: Easy to use, navigate, and understand Provide direct, actionable information relevant to the query Professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers

SEOmoz?s own Keyword Analysis Tool does a good job collecting all of these metrics and providing a comparative score for any given search term or phrase.

Where do we get all of this knowledge about keyword demand and keyword referrals? From research sources like these listed here: Google Adwords? Keyword Tool Google Insights for Search Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Wordtracker?s Free Basic Keyword Demand

long tail keywords often convert better, because they catch people later in the buying/conversion cycle. A person searching for "shoes" is probably browsing, and not ready to buy. On the other hand, someone searching for "best price on Air Jordan size 12" practically has their wallet out!