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So it's Thursday ... just one more day before the weekend rolls around and I can take a whole day off. Well that's my dream but I know the reality is that I'll be doing some work on Saturday ... and some on Sunday too.

So let's not get too lost in fantasies ... instead let's look at some interesting facts and figures and not all of them are going to be about search engines.

Habits change
Over on one of the biggest mainstream webmaster boards there are a few people lamenting the fact that their rankings are up but their traffic is down. These are guys who were doing well last year and even earlier this year but then saw their rankings drop away as Google made some changes to its infrastructure and its algorithm.

Now their rankings are coming back but they're not seeing the same levels of traffic and they're wondering why. Some are even going so far as to blame the drop in their traffic on the World Cup.

Really? A football match is going to have an impact on your traffic? People are going to stop searching for the information that you can provide because they want to watch the World Cup instead?

Well that may be possible but there are other possibilities too and before I blamed it on the World Cup I think I would want to look at some of those alternative reasons.

Maybe the description that the search engine is showing for my site isn't quite as appealing as the description that's showing for the site just below mine. Perhaps my site's good search engine rankings aren't quite as good as I think they are ... with personalized search you never know what other people might be seeing for the terms they're searching for and what they're seeing may not be anything like what I'm seeing.

And then of course there's the very obvious possibility that people may not be searching for a particular term as much as they used to. Although it's unlikely that the volume of searches for a particular non-seasonal term would drop significantly in a short period of time it's not impossible and people are change their search habits.

At SES Toronto a Google spokesperson told the audience that the way people searched was changing and more and more people are searching for longer terms these days. Maybe that's another reason that some people are noticing a drop in their traffic despite the fact that they see their sites as being at the top of the results pages.

Technology changes too
The way people search isn't the only thing that's changing on the Web. Earlier this week, over on Porn Resource, I looked at the devices that people were using to access the Web and the way they are changing.

Obviously more and more people are using hand-held devices to surf the Net ... smart-phones and iPads are obviously going to spring to mind ... but those devices aren't just changing the way we access the Net. Those devices are changing other things too and one of the most surprising changes that they're bringing is the number of times a surfer might access a site.

It seems that people who use smart-phones and iPads are likely to visit their favorite sites more frequently ... and stay on the site longer ... than people who access those same sites via PCs and laptops.

And there's another interesting stat that only came to light yesterday ... 40 per cent of smart-phone users spend an hour a day engaging with mobile applications. So why aren't you at least thinking about how you can get people to start looking at what you're selling on their mobile devices?

If you ever thought for a moment that things didn't move quickly when you're working on the Net there are some facts that have got to show you that if you aren't up there with technology as it changes then you're going to get left behind.

If you're slipping behind your market then you really do need to make an effort to catch up because your market isn't going to wait for you ... not when some of your competitors are already where your market is at and ready to sell them what they want to buy.

So don't sit back and rely on getting sales from on old technology and old surfing habits. Instead you need to be out there on the cutting edge ... taking your marketing message to where your market is going ... and not playing catch up and selling to those stragglers who have yet to engage with the new technology that so many others are using today.