Riding the Google Coaster.

As a person who is trying to achieve success with a website, it is essential to take a on google as part of your life if your depending on getting a steady flow of traffic to your site to accomplish your goals. There are a ton of search engines out there, but Google is the king by far. In the year I've ran UltraCellSaver.com, we've had so many ups and downs with google. When the site first went up, it seemed as if we were in google right away, and everything was great, and then, GONE. Then the learning process begins, learning of the "Google Sandbox," which will keep your website out of the google ranks simply due to being new, and proving its a legit site, not a spam or illegal site, etc. Then once out of the sandbox, optimization. What does google like? What does google not like? What does Google penalize you for? The roller coaster seemingly never ends, as Google seemingly constantly changes their methods. Hours upon hours of testing and experimenting with different on page factors is the only way to halfway figure things out. Our site has been running for a little over a year, and certain things we've determined are definitely beneficial to any site such as incoming links to your site. We've compiled lists of directories out there and have been hard at work getting listed all over the net as much as we can, and that's something that any website that is looking to grow needs to do, plain and simple. But as we've learned, incoming links are GREAT, but are only half the battle. The on page factors play such a huge part, and almost every engine looks at different factors when determining your sites rank. Everyone wants to be on top in the google ranks, but google is seemingly the hardest to figure out. We've had some good week long runs of coming in on the first page of results for our targeted keywords, then a week later, we're gone again, and back to the drawing board to see why we're being penalized now. Luckily we've gotten ourselves back into google on a few occasions, recently having a great 2 week run in great positions in google, but now we're back to trying to figure out what we could be penalized for now. Google is definitely a learning process that will be on going as we attempt to settle into a nice spot that will let our site figuratively "Get over the hump" and continue on at a steady pace. Eventually we'll tackle the google monster and get off the roller coaster once and for all! The only approach I can suggest, is learning the way things work, avoid the shortcuts and cheats, because taking a chance on Google taking you out of their engine for good, is not a chance worth taking.