You know that sinking feeling you get when you are singled out for punishment. Whether its the memory of second grade Mrs. Harris directing you to the corner for dunce cap treatment, or your college professor's glare at your class disturbance, everyone has experienced the feeling at some point or another. With regard to google and rankings the feeling is usually a manifestation of suspicion that something is just not going right. Something that may lead you to suspect that your site is being penalized by Google for some reason.

First thing is to check out your site's analytics and determine whether there has been an unusual drop in your normal traffic pattern. If indeed you find something amiss you need to figure out if it has to do with your site or with a back-link. Another way to check if you may be under some sort of filter is by searching yourdomain.com. If your domain does not show up as number one and you are an established site, you have an issue.

Additionally if site:yourdomain.com doesn't bring up any results it's a red flag that there is a big problem. It might be a mistake on your part that can be rectified or it might be something worse. Worst case scenario you might have to file a reconsideration request from Google. This should be used as a last resort after rechecking that something has really gone wrong. Take your time in considering a submission because if your site is okay and you haven't done anything wrong it may just be a cause of season change or a one time fluke.

If unfortunately your site is penalized and the only way to regain your rankings is by filing then you have no choice. There's a whole system to filing and I'm not going to elaborate further due to the large amount of rumors and ideas associated with it. It's sort of a confession about what was established incorrectly and a request to regain ranking... Hopefully everyone should keep up their sites in a proper manner and never need to file!

Google Analytics is a free service offered to assist you in keeping track of how your website is working for you, the Internet advertiser. This Ad Word Tool gives you, the merchant, detailed information and tracks your website activity.

One of analytics main goals is it allows you to keep track of your conversions, the goal that brings you revenue. When an ad word campaign is added to analytics, you will receive a conversion code which must be placed on the page of your website that you will use to count these conversions. Placing this code on a purchase or sale page will help online commerce website trace purchases and sales. If your site does not allow for purchases or sales, you might want to place the conversion code on a page where users land to request information or send email, this would be a lead page-giving you prospective clients.

Sometimes a website can have a sign up page for visitors to subscribe to a newsletter or download information, and the code would be placed on this page and the sign up becomes a conversion.

Viewing your report from analytics is a very important tool for your website because it lets you know how your site is working. You will receive the following information:

How many visitors came to your Website
How many impressions your ad campaign received
How many clicks your campaign received
The total cost of your clicks
The average cost per click
The total conversions received
Your bounce rate
How much time each visitor spends on your site

This great tool from Google, if used properly, can help bring success to your website. Sometimes we think our web design is perfect when in reality it is not working for you, and because you can see this first hand, you will know if you have to make web design changes, or landing page changes. Your professional Internet advertiser will be able to advise you if changes need to be made.

Article: Around the year 1958 a horror/science fiction film made its debut called "The Blob". It was a movie about a living substance that absorbed and swallowed anything in its path. The more it absorbed the bigger it became until it was eventually destroyed at the end of the movie. Is google becoming a "search engine blob"?

Google had it's initial public offering in 2004 and since then it has become the number one search engine on the planet. Google indexes something like a billion or more websites daily and this number is increasing daily.

According to the Google Blog the first index in 1998 contained about twenty six million pages, just two years later and the indexed reached a billion. I think the blog goes on to mention that they stopped counting at a trillion pages.

In just a few years Google has been indexing and absorbing more and more content. The data that Google is collecting is just mind boggling.

Google indexes text, images, video and even sound clips. In the next few years will it index and consume the entire planets data? Will every single database in existence be indexed by Google? Will we even have the need to pick up a book anymore? The term "Google it" is already part of our vocabulary. I guess years down the road instead of teachers telling their students to use a dictionary they will just tell them to "Google It".

At the rate we're going when they look up your name to see you good and bad deeds of your life. Will G-D google it?

Google TV is a new experience in the world of technology as it combines TV with the Internet and all its apps. Is Google TV something you have not heard about yet? Where have you been? Google TV is a smart TV platform and works on HDTV's through a set up box. This operating system was developed by Google, Intel, Sony and Logitech who developed the set up boxes. This amazing system became available in May of 2010.

The Google system works with a box on top of your TV and features video on demand, free office software, a browser, a remote control and a keyboard interface. Just type in what you want to watch and Google finds it for you and also lets you search for anything you like. Access is now as easy as a single click, changing between TV and the Internet. Google informed us that the new platform would be incorporated into new HDTV sets and Blu-ray players by Sony. Logitech will continue to develop set top boxes, and all systems will be powered by an Intel systems chip and will be available through any provider such as Dish Network. A Sony Internet TV should be released for sale soon.

Google TV will come with many apps, such as Netflix, Twitter, Pandora, Napster and Game time among others, already loaded As of November 2010, Dish Network now offers Google TV to its customers. This requires a DVR service and picture this; your Iphone can be used as a remote control!

One of the features of Google TV is the search bar for Internet and TV. You also get to keep traditional programming through your cable box or satellite dish. Your task bar allows you to do all the things current cable TV allows, like start over, watch programs previously shown and tape future shows. The applications that are now available to you through your TV are unbelievable. We used to watch TV on our PC monitors, now we can watch TV and search the Internet at the same time on our TV's!

Technology continues to bring us amazing things in our ever fast paced world.

A step above Google Analytics, the Filter and Segmentation tools will help you take your analysis to the next level. The reason being, the more you can segment your data the more you can understand your customers' behavior and the more positive actions you can take to increase your profits. A company owner who can segment his data to include how a visitor came to view your site, for example via an email marketing campaign, or a well-placed advertisement on a different site, and who can then view the percentage of those visitors who end up buying a product, will know exactly which avenue of advertising is worthwhile to invest his time and money into.

There are two complementary features offered by Google Analytics which allow you to shape your data and gain a deeper understanding of what is occurring on your site, Profile Features and Advanced Segmentation. Google Profile Filters allows you to permanently modify (screen or suppress) the data that flows into your profiles so it will be most useful to you and you won't have unnecessary data overwhelming your reports. The Advanced Segmentation feature gives you the room to define and save reports for your operation based on your own customized criteria. You can choose which factors you would like to monitor on your site like top keywords,top referrers, etc and sit back as the reports flow in. A couple of the basic Profile Filters include: Upper Lower Case Blending- There are some servers that allow the blend of uppercase and lowercase URLs. Implementing a filter for all your URLS that they should be in the same case will make your job of tracking access to different or specialized sites way easier.

Session ID Confusion- A session ID refers to the unique number given by a web server to each visitor. Many times your site URLs may unnecessarily be comprised of long session IDs which will cause faulty reports on your page visits. Profile Filters allows you to strip these IDs out.

IP Address Exclusion Filtering- An IP Exclusion Filter can successfully filter your internal traffic (caused by you and your staff) so only the traffic you care about (visitors) will be recorded.

Many times an overflow of incoming data can be very overwhelming. By putting a handle and controlling what data you receive, your job will be less daunting and much simpler. But beware, that once your filters are established you can't retrieve the lost data. It is recommended to create a couple of profiles of your domain. This allows you multiple views of all your site data. After your filters are set up, the next step will be Advanced Segmentation, which will give you a more detailed and precise report on your customers habits.

Sometimes it may happen that a site owner will create a website, apply the best SEO techniques and yet nothing happens, no ranking. This website may be the recipient of a Google filter, the sandbox, which is a filter created by Google that is applied to new websites looking to rank on the search results page for specific keywords. The reason the filter was created is to prevent spammers and SEOs from monopolizing the search results by fulfilling all Google's criteria. Many times a website will have been created for the main goal of taking the top search spots and in reality the website contains absolutely nothing useful. This would cause the quality of search results to drop.

Another reason for the sandbox effect is to hold back newly developed websites ( even legitimate ones) from immediately taking top placement on search result pages.

If you want to check out whether your website is being sand-boxed or if its being banned for some reason, there are a few ways to check: -If you optimized with your primary intention of showing up in Google search results, you check and you're not ranked, but you test your keywords on Yahoo/live and it ranks well.

-If your website is outranked. Meaning, that you key in the specific name of your site minus the www and the com (for example "bitochon") and its not showing up.

-Your page doesn't rank even for an exact title match.

If you find that your website is being banned ( because when you typed in the full URL a message stated that your search didn't match any documents) you need to contact Google and request to be placed back on. Just be sure to eliminate any factor from your website that may have caused you to be banned in the first place.

Now that you know why you are not being ranked you would like to do something to get yourself ranked. Unfortunately there's almost nothing you can do to help it! You just need to wait until Google decides to release your site. In the interim do what you can to improve and develop your site. Add new content, modify the graphics, research what the customers will look for, etc and make it look its best before it gets sent out into the world (being ranked) Try to avoid over-optimization by refining your titles too much and perfecting the content too much. It won't help you get out faster. Sometimes a site may lengthen their sandbox 'vacation' by attracting links from low quality sites or sites built specifically to fool Google.

Some people have deduced that there is a way expedite a sandbox release by receiving inbound links from reputable domains in a similar industry. Having these quality sites want to link to tours shows Google What type pf site you are or are trying to become. There is a way to avoid the sandbox altogether when launching a website. Try to stay away from popular, competitive keywords. If you create a site marketing a popular item or idea, of course Google will want to do a thorough checking into your site to ensure that you are genuine and not just trying to push your way into top placement with no real content. On the other hand a site targeting keywords that aren't so popular won't need the same researching.

Another idea is to register as a sub domain under a trusted, reputable domain. A new sub-domain will usually avid the sandbox altogether or at least have a significantly shorter stay.

The sandbox effect though a little frustrating for those couple of months is a real benefit in the long run. It helps to protect your website and established reputation from the sites cropping up on a constant basis by doing a thorough research on their credentials. Just keep optimizing the honest way.

Google Analytics is a free website statistics program offered by Google that offers you detailed statistics about visitors to your website and if they're successful at finding what they came for. It allows you to gather and analyze data about your website traffic so you can optimize your marketing campaigns accordingly. Many times the wealth of information available can be overwhelming to the marketer. Below I will focus on a couple of the important advantages and how to make use of them easily.

When you log into your Google Analytics account you will notice the Dashboard. Here is where the amount if visitors to your site and the overall bounce rate is recorded. Customize the Dashboard with all the information you need and you even have the option of emailing it to others.

One main reason for tracking your website data is to be informed of any significant occurrences , so you can respond appropriately. For example if the number of visitors to your site drops drastically, you will know and be able to figure out what the problem is. If its a faulty message or a hard-to-read promotion that causes people to lose interest, you will be a able to rectify it before too much damage has been done. There is a new feature, not released yet, that is called Analytics Intelligence that will be able to alert you to key changes in your analytics data. These alerts can be emailed directly to you, to inform you of the latest happenings.

It is best to choose a few primary goals to start with. Checking your site's overall trends and sources of visitor traffic should be done on a regular basis. Google Analytics can even tell you whether a certain time of day or specific days of the week is peak time for visitors . It's also important to monitor conversions from your advertising sources to determine which ads are performing like you want to ensure that you're money is being spent wisely.

There is another option of having your data be sent to you via Google Analytics email report capability. Simply click on the email icon in Google Analytics and customize the options to suit your needs. This way even if you occasionally forget to go check how your site is doing, you will get the notifications delivered right to you.

If you are in the paid advertising business, like Pay Per Click, email marketing, etc. you can use campaign tracking. Just by adding in a bit of informaions to the URLs setup in your marketing campaigns, Google Analytics will send you a detailed report of your campaign activity. It's easy to add a request for your campaign report to be emailed weekly via the Dashboard.

Other useful features that Google Analytics offers include:

With the Flexible Customization feature you can get the data you need, organized in a clear easy to read way, with the customizations you choose. Google Analytics Data Export Api allows you to collect data, create integrations, and develop client applications with. Custom variables gives you the power and flexibility to customize GA to collect the data that best suit your business.

These tips should help you understand and use Google Analytics to better your website in an easy, not overwhelming fashion. You will be more prepared to write better-targeted ads and strengthen your marketing initiatives. Try it, you'll only see the benefits.

Google's PageRank bar, more commonly referred to as The Green Bar, is used to measure the popularity of a website. PageRank can be described as Google's popularity contest. These horizontal bars show people at a glance whether this page is considered a high-quality page and if it's worth checking out. The rating is based in accordance with how other web-users view the page; whether they deemed it important enough to link their page to it! PageRank shows how many inbound links a website has. The green bar's rating is based on totally objective criteria.

The green bar is visible on the Google Toolbar. The Google Toolbar is found just above the browser's tab bar and provides a box to type in search words to carry out web searches. The Google Toolbar is equipped with numerous helpful tools to help the web user. Included are such tools as spell-checker, translation, AutoLink, and AutoFill to name a few.

The Google Directory PageRank is in the form of an 8 unit measurement. This small graphic of page ranking can be found to the left of a site's listing. The Google directory doesn't show the PageRank as a numeric value like the Google toolbar does; it only shows it as a green bar. It appears that Google updates its directory rating more frequently than its toolbar. If you want the most accurate ratings it will probably be most beneficial to you to check the directory ratings.

There are millions of web pages today, all with different PageRanks. Increasing PageRank is a constant job, though not too difficult. Through various techniques Internet marketers explore the different venues available to help increase their PageRank. Many try searching the Web for the commonly keyed in words that are relevant to their site, in order to add the popular keywords to their web page. Some employ the various SEO methods to help the search engines better understand what their page is about. Others invest in a better web design to gain popularity.

So does the green bar really make a difference? If you want to know what the world thinks of your website than it definitely does.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a process of indexing and retrieving that is based on the idea that words used in the same or similar context tend to have similar meanings. LSI uses a mathematical technique to determine if there are any patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in a body of text. Then, LSI is able to form a concept of the paragraph or body of text by creating comparisons between the terms that occur in similar contexts.

Latent semantic indexing adds in an important part to the process of document indexing. LSI records which keywords are found in a specific document and in addition it appraises the entire document collection to see if there are any words in common with other pages. Semantically close and semantically distant are terms used with LSI to describe documents with shared words. Semantically close would describe a document that has many words in common while semantically distant would describe one that has few shared words. The LSI algorithm doesn't understand the meaning of the word though the way it tracks a pattern makes it appear extremely intelligent.

A great advantage of LSI is that it has no idea what the document or word that it is analyzing means; it is a strictly mathematical approach. Therefore it has the capabilities to be used in any document collection, in any language. LSI can be used together with a regular keyword search, or instead of one, with positive results.

It is a useful tool to use when you are conducting a search and want to gather background or research information, because LSI can bring up information that is not necessarily restricted to the typed in keywords. For example, if one were to conduct a search for a said American president, information about occurrences during his presidency, or during the same time period are sure to come up, as well as principles he might have stood for regardless if his name was mentioned in any of the resulting documents. LSI 'knows' that there is a connection between the two due to close semantic ties.

LSI also allows the user to compile a list of results of his search and then will search further for results that will closely correlate with the first ones. This allows the user to guide the search engine to the most accurate and useful result.

In addition, it has the ability to act as a customized spam filter. By training a latent semantic algorithm on your inbox and common spam messages, you may be able to tag potentially harmful spam and unnecessary junk mail.

There are many other advantageous uses for LSI, the forerunner of search engine optimization today. It is a worthwhile investment to optimize your website to focus on LSI. As always a quality and updated website will always be the best choice for long-term Internet success.