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You know, one of the advantages of living in Australia is that I get to live your tomorrow before you do. So here I am sitting in the office at 11.30am on Thursday morning and most of you guys are still living in yesterday. That must suck if yesterday was a crappy day.

Of course the time zones around the world are just there to help us establish marker points in our day, and the reality is that wherever we are the time is right now. But just in case you're wondering what your tomorrow might be like then I can tell you that Thursday seems like a pretty good day ... at least it is for Steve and me.

I know that some others aren't doing so well and a few are experiencing a great deal of pain since Google seems to have done an update on their algorithm late last week. I'm not sure what the update did but there are plenty of people complaining that their sites that ranked well for many search terms have fallen back to the second page ... or even worse.

Fortunately whatever the update was it doesn't seem to have affected any of our clients at the moment. They're still all on page one for important terms and a few who have page two listings aren't doing all that badly either.

Now you might think that the second page isn't all that bad ... I mean what's the difference between being number 11 and being number 10? Well in the past the difference has actually huge and has meant a drop of thousands of dollars in your income level if you did slide beyond the first page of Google.

Actually you could have even noticed a drop in your income if you drifted lower than the fourth spot because many people change their search parameters if they haven't found anything that attracts them in the first four listings. But I wonder if that's always the case ... and I wonder if things might not be changing slightly...

There was a time when people didn't scroll and various tests confirmed that. Many people just didn't bother looking lower down a web page than what they could see on the first screen. Lately though, there have been one or two surveys that have challenged that belief and I wonder if Steve and I aren't beginning to see something similar.

One of our clients, who operates a niche business ranks very well for a number of important terms but falls to the number 11 spot for several other terms. You might think that they wouldn't get much traffic for those terms that put them on the second page but in fact they do.

So why do they get so much traffic for terms where they don't rank all that well? Perhaps the answer for them ... and some hope for you ... can be found in the fact that around seven out of the top 10 sites that rank for some of those important terms are big directory sites ... and they're obviously big directory sites.

The surfers who are looking for what our client sells are looking for specific businesses and not for directories so they seem to be willing to go beyond the fourth listing ... and even beyond the first page ... to find what they want.

So what can you do with your sites if you're battling for a good position but finding it hard to get on to the first page because there are directories filling a lot of the top spots? Well perhaps you need to do all you can to ensure that you don't look like one of those big directory sites. If you can show the surfers who are hitting the search engine results pages that your site could be far more helpful than the directory sites then they will come to you.

To achieve that goal you're going to need to ensure that you have an absolute killer description written for each of your web pages. Of course Google doesn't always use the description that you've included so you need to look at the keywords that are important for each web page because sometimes Google picks up the keyword and the surrounding phrase and displays that as the description.

You need to make sure that you've used those keywords in attractive sentences and phrases so that if Google or the other search engines pick up those phrases and used them as the description for your page it will still be attractive for anyone who sees your page listed. I admit that it's not always going to be easy to achieve something like that but it's what you've got to aim for if you want that search engine traffic.

That's just something that might help you pull in some more traffic from the search engines. You may think that all the effort it could take is not going to rewarded by increased sales but personally I still think that every surfer you can pick up from a search engine is golden.