Author: Peter R. Doliaen
7 Insider SEO Tips To Booast Your Website Traffic
Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 @ 7:49 am
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.
The Google Slap, as it has been unofficially called, was the introduction of a new quality metric in the Awords system, the effect was that a lot of Adword users suddenly found that most of their keywords had become inactive overnight. The solution suggested by Google was to either improve the “quality” of the website you were advertising or increase the max cost per click that you were willing to pay. In some cases it was as much as $5 or $10 which many considered a slap in the face!
Many internet marketing people have given up on PPC as it is becoming too expensive and almost impossible to make money with. A better solution is to try and get more free organic traffic from the major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three account for 85-95% of the search traffic out there.
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. One of the biggest problems webmasters have these days is the issue of duplicate content on their website. It’s a very common problem to have because it’s so easy to just copy and paste material from other sources onto your website. There maybe no copyright issue or problem but the search engines hate it and may de-index your pages into the supplemental results. Fix the problem by writing some original content and remove the offending content.
2. As already mentioned the SE’s (search engines) hate duplicated content but love original content. One of the best ways to get more traffic for your site is to add original content, however you can. Try writing it yourself or ask family members, friends or relatives. You can try to hire students or sub contract a freelancer to do it, but just do it!. Try and add at least 650 words to each page using your keywords and some good descriptive test.
3. Remove all those non paying affiliate links that have never made you a penny in years, the search engines hate them and they make your site look cheap. As well as that they are probably bleeding valuable page rank from your site unless you are using the nofollow parameter, see point 6 below.
4. A big mistake many webmasters make is to link all their non-money pages from every page on their site. Pages like contact us, privacy policy, site map and disclosures are often linked from every page, this will degrade the effectiveness of your money keyword pages and they will not rank as high. In addition these pages will drain off page rank, which is very valuable, from your important pages and be wasted!.
5. Two of the most important parts of each page is the title and description, and each page should have unique ones. This is very important for SEO and will improve your rankings. Many webmasters either make the mistake or just forget to fix them when creating new pages. Task yourself with checking every page in your site and take a little time to write new titles and descriptions, the search engines will love it.
6. The nofollow tag can prevent you from wasting valuable page rank in your non money pages like the privacy policy or the contact us page. It can also be used, and should be used in all affiliate links, after all why are are you sending your page rank to the affiliate company?. See the example below for details:
Change it to this by inserting rel=”nofollow” in the link as shown
7. Back links to your site is still the number one factor in determining your search engine position. The best way to achieve this is by submitting well written and original articles to the top article directories. The article should be between 575 and 800 words in lenght and contain a resource box linking to your website. Modify your articles as much as possible when submitting to different directories to avoid duplicate content issues.
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