Internet Marketing For Small Business

Last Wednesday morning I went to check my stats at my comedy blog, www.bittertonic.com, as I do numerous times throughout the day due to my stat-tracking addiction, and was pretty amazed to see that they were very low. I didn’t think too much about it as I continued my morning coffee and email reading.

But when I went to check in the afternoon, I realized something was definitely wrong. My numbers were about a quarter of what they should be.

Uh oh.

About a week prior I had started getting at least 200 page views a day, the majority coming from Google. Not tremendous, but OK, since I hadn’t done that much marketing work on them. The blog was built so that I could put up my original comedy stuff on it, but first I had to learn about blogging, how to do it and what to use, etc. and so original comedy creation had taken a back seat. I was going to do the big marketing and community building stuff when I put up more of my own content.

I had chosen WordPress for blogging months before and that turned out to be the right choice. It is great open-source blogging software program with a super community who keep churning out unbelievable plugins that can really make the program powerful. It has also become one of the 5 most popular blog platforms, so that when you sign up for extra services or widgets with other companies, like Feedburner, or addthis.com, they always have a WordPress version, so you never feel left out.

Some of the best plugins are Search Engine Optimization plugins, and I had added Aaron Schaefer’s Optimal Title, which move your blog’s name to the end of your Page Title, so that the important words come first, and Head Meta Description by Kaf Oseo, which creates a unique meta description tag for each page, and so I was pretty pleased with the number of visitors coming from Google. Most of them were coming to see a ridiculously funny unicorn video called Charlie Goes To Candy Mountain.

But not any more. Whereas for months that post was in the top 8 in Google’s search result for numerous permutations of the video name, sometimes hitting number 2 right under YouTube’s number 1 slot – for which I was ridiculously proud – starting Wednesday it was gone. Nowhere near.

In fact, all my posts were gone. Nothing was showing up in Google except my home page, which used to sit at number 1 for Bitter Tonic, but now was demoted to number 4. And when I searched my name, my Bitter Tonic profile came up dead last.

I was dumped from Google. Demoted. Banned.

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