Disaster #17. Crashed To Smithereens By Looking In Your Rear View Mirror

You can fall victim to a rear-view mirror crash by spending too much time reflecting on how you're doing and stat checking so that you're no longer driving. I know this goes against what I was saying earlier with the drive-by. You do need to monitor things.

But as with many things in life, this is all about balance. You can't look at the statistics and fall into analysis paralysis, but at the same time you can't constantly be driving forward and not actually looking at what you've done and how you're performing.

If you spend too much time looking in the so-called rear-view mirror of your traffic and looking at how the stats are going or clicking on refresh to see how many hits you've got, or checking your rankings every few hours on all the different search engines for all your different phrases, you're not actually moving forward. You're doing what my good friend Mike Filsaime would describe as "treading water" rather than "swimming forward".

If you're treading water, eventually you're going to die because you're not moving forward. So you need to tread water, which is checking your statistics, but you also need to move forward by swimming. To do that you need to be constantly looking for new ways of getting traffic and improving on existing ways, not just measuring what you've already implemented.

Disaster #18. Caught Driving Under The Influence

If you see somebody advising you to engage in questionable search engine optimization tactics, then you're possibly driving under the influence. Let's just say you're influenced by this so much that you step over to the dark side and start engaging in black hat SEO techniques.

If you've never come across the phrase 'black hat,' it refers to things that are not officially allowed or accepted by the search engines. Anything that is ok with the search engines is referred to as 'white hat,' and anything that's in-between is, no surprise, called 'gray hat.'

If you're influenced by somebody that's peddling 'black hat' techniques and you're influenced by this so much, you're always running the risk of getting pulled off and penalized by the search engine police.

We've all faced the temptation at one point or another to engage in the latest trick or fad or search engine cheat method to rise to the top overnight. Although these can attain some short-term benefits, the long term benefits are non-existent and can lead to being removed from the index or even banned altogether.

So try and avoid the 'get traffic quick' temptations of black hat. You don't want to always be looking over your shoulder wondering if you're going to be removed from the indexes. It's far better to create quality content on your site and lots of it and start getting high rankings in the search engines for all your best phrases on merit, rather than just applying some wizard black hat technique.

About the Author

You can grab a a free 30-minute MP3 Audio "How To Get Traffic - Insider Secrets Revealed" and a free 40-page Ebook on how to get traffic just by going to http://www.michaelstrafficvideos.com