How to identify and correct search engine traffic drops

[mandy]

3 part article:

programmer friend recently contacted me about a site with search traffic that had nosedived. He works on the backend, and has little impact on SEO (define). But his boss was feeling the pain, creating a ripple effect through the company. I posed several questions, which he forwarded to his boss. The boss couldn't answer any of them quickly, which made me think about how important it is to have a good understanding of some basic organic search benchmarks, even during periods of high search traffic. In the unfortunate event that organic search traffic declines from its norm, a clear, multidimensional definition of normal is a critical component when diagnosing and fixing the problem...

Part 1: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625287

With that in mind, here are some ways to fix organic search problems when you can detect drops in specific measurements.

Significant Site Changes Made -- With Dates

You can't always say with complete accuracy a change in search traffic or rankings is tied directly to changes you made to a site page. But you can say with certainty the engines will never evaluate or act on changes they haven't yet noticed. Webmaster forums and blogs overflow with threads about making a change one day, then disappearing from SERPs (define) the next. Few people bother to check the search engines' cached pages before they jump to this conclusion...

Part 2: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625472

Index Counts

Monitoring index counts on a daily basis can cause a great deal of stress and anxiety. Even when site performance is normal, search engine index counts can fluctuate wildly. As with the other metrics I've discussed, I would consider a sharp drop in index count a concern only when it accompanies a drop in traffic, and then, only if you can assume beyond a reasonable doubt the index count drop is causal, not coincidental, to the traffic drop. In other words, if your index count drops by 30 percent at Google, but the newly-missing pages never brought in search traffic anyway, plummeting index counts aren’t the source of your traffic problem...

Part 3: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625594