A while back I discovered that the traffic I was used to getting to my main site absolutely free from Google had dried up - completely! I mean, there was not a sniff of Google traffic on my site. A bunch of top ten rankings simply disappeared overnight.

In the past, I would have started an immediate game of "catch the algorithm." I would have gone to sources I know who spend all their time trying to reverse engineer Google's rankings to figure out what'll get top rankings.

But the way Google's algorithm has jumped around this past year, I've gotten tired of constantly tweaking pages to regain my rankings. So this time I decided to do something different. I left my pages as they were and worked on building traffic through other means - syndicating my articles to other sites in return for a one-way incoming links, buying pay-per-click traffic, submitting to more directories.

Rather than spending my time trying to protect what I already had, I worked on building new sources of traffic.

A few weeks later, I noticed a sudden spike in traffic. Sure enough, my lost top ten rankings in Google had reappeared as mysteriously as they had left. It goes to show the foolishness of playing "chase the algorithm" with Google. If I had reworked those pages, who knows if they would have come back to where they started.

I've become increasingly convinced that the best strategy for search engine optimization is:

- Write lots of pages that are clearly focused on the keywords you want to target

- Write them for the people who will read them moreso than writing them for the search engines

- Include your keywords in the title, and scatter them througout the page in headings, text, and links

- Make sure that a good number of the links that come into the page use your keywords in the link text

- Then leave those pages be

Some pages will get high rankings, others will not. But when the search engine algorithms change to something less favorable to your exact keyword density and distribution, you'll have other pages for other keywords, and those pages will have different densities and different distributions that will rise in the rankings to take the others' place.

If you write well and clearly for your readers, you'll do better than if you write solely to please the search engine spiders.

There's another benefit, too, of not playing "chase the algorithm." Every hour you spend studying the latest theories and tweaking your pages is an hour you could have spent building additional sources of traffic. Every dollar you spend on professional SEO firms are a dollar you could have spent on other traffic-building strategies.

The most dangerous number in marketing is the number "one." If free search engine traffic - or any other traffic source - is your one and only source of traffic, you'll always be vulnerable. If something happens to that traffic source, your business is crippled.

Smart business owners always focus on developing multiple streams of traffic. It's the only way to protect yourself from unexpected changes in the market.

If you're one of the many business owners who have built their business on the uncertain whims of Google, wise up. Google is not in business to provide you with all the free traffic you need.

Build pages that Google will find relevant for your keywords. Then leave them be and focus on building other sources of traffic. If you do, your business will be far less vulnerable and far more profitable.