If you are into seo and like to know how well your website or blog is doing, then you might check your traffic levels on a regular basis. Don’t be surprised if you see large spikes in the traffic, it could be that someone has stumbled your post on stumble upon, or posted it on Digg. If it is a downward spike then it could be that there is something wrong with your sign up form; errors on this can prevent conversion.

Sometimes a spike in the traffic levels is not due to traffic referrals at all. Occasionally it could be down to the market where products or information such as you are offering have taken off. Sudden spikes in the traffic are not hard to analyse and are always worth investigating. You may be getting less useful traffic because the number of bounces on your site have increased, this could be due to an erroneous redirect. The reasons for a spike in the level of traffic to your site could be caused by any one of the above reasons. If you are not sure what the spike is a result of then you should use Google analytics: running a number of reports could help you to identify the problem.

Yahoo has recently submitted a patent that contains a method for automating seo. While Yahoo’s patent does detail some of the basics for optimising a page, many of the things that are involved in make websites and web pages search engine friendly are not addressed. One of the main reasons behind seo has nothing to do with page rank and using the most popular keywords to attract traffic.

Good seo involves a knowledge of how the search engines work to make indexing a site quicker and easier and to understand the pages that are being indexed. Seo also involves a knowledge of your audience to know what sort of people are interested in what a site offers, and how they might find that site more easily. When you engage in seo in this way then the words on your web page may not be the most popular or regularly searched words, but they should be the right words for attracting the type of audience that you want

Some people may applaud what Yahoo intends to do, but for others a patent proposing search engines should be involved in seo, might be regarded as creating a conflict of interests that raises ethical questions.