2008 brings new challenges to the internet marketer; the internet is becoming a tough place to do business, or is it? Certainly it is if you have relied on cheap PPC from Google Adwords or organic search traffic from doorway pages, those days are now long gone. PPC traffic from the search engines is now becoming expensive, that is if you can even get your ads to display following the Google Slap.
For those still in the dark, Google introduced a new quality metric in their PPC system which also takes into account the "quality" of your website that you want to advertise. If they consider it not good enough the costs of clicks is increased, in some cases to ridiculous figures like $5 or $10 a click!
So for many the only practical solution, and in my opinion the best, is to get more free organic traffic from the search engines. We are taking about Google, Yahoo and MSN as between them they account for about 90-95% of all the searches performed.
Most website can be improved in terms of SEO with a little work, if you have been neglecting your site over the last few years now would be a good time to do a make over. Here are some quick fixes that you can make:
1. There is a big issue with duplicate content on websites, never copy and paste content from other websites, it may look good but it will kill your website and more than likely get your site banned or pages de-indexed from the listings. If you have copied material from other sites replace it with some re-written text.
Get more free orangic traffic to your website by adding some original content, ususally add at least 500 words per page using keywords important to your business and some good descriptive text. The search engines will simply love this and if you do the basic page SEO requirements you will get listed. Be creative in how you generate the original content, you can pay students or even school kids, ask workers or employee's, or even write some of it yourself. The key point is that it is original, it does not have to be Shakespeare.
3. Many websites still keep affiliate links for years even though they have never made any money from them, if this is you get ride of them. If they are none productive not only do they make your site look un-professional they can also bleed valuable page rank from your site. If you want to keep them fortunatley there is an easy fix, see below for details.
4. Do not link to your site map, contact us, privacy policy, disclosures pages etc from every page on your site, just link from the home page. Firstly it is not necessary, if someone wants that info they will look 1st at the home page, secondly all those links will degrade your internal link reputation for your money keywords and this is not good for SEO. These pages will also bleed page rank away from the important pages in your site which you want to rank for.
5. Check that every page in your site has a different title and description, this is so important. It still amazes me to find web sites with titles like "New Page 1" and "index.htm" etc. These are the default names generated by the web design application that was used. Another bad habit, for which I'm guilty, is to copy an existing page to use as a template then forget to edit the title and description resulting in many pages with the same title and description. Don't be surprised if these pages don't rank well in the search engines.
6. When linking to pages that are not important to you, like the privacy page, the contact us page and in affiliate links etc, use the nofollow parameter to stop your valuable page rank from being wasted in pages that will never rank in the search engines. For example if your link is this:
Click Here For Info
Alter it to this by inserting rel="nofollow" as shown below in the link
Click Here For Info
7. The best way by far to boast your rankings and get more traffic is by writing original articles, about 550 to 750 words, and submitting them to the top article directories. Of course you must also include your resource box with each article with links pointing back to your site. Does article writing work?, yes absolutely but the key is to make sure that your article is original and secondly do not submit the same article to more than one directory.
About the Author:
Peter R. Doliaen is an internet marketer and an expert in SEO, he loves to increase search engine traffic and is constantly on the lookout for the top SEO software.
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