Gone are the days when you could get easy traffic from the search engines using doorway type pages, or even cheap clicks using PPC such as Google Adwords. The recent Google Slap has made it now fairly difficult to promote affiliate programs using Adwords. Even if you have your own website it now has to meet certain quality standards or the click price goes up rapidly.
Many Google Aword users were suddenly faced with a big increase in the cost of keywords when Google introducded their new quality metric. Some keywords which were previously between $0.3 to $0.5 were increased to as much as $5-10, this is what many call the Google slap.
The 3 big search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN account for about 80-95% of the search traffic, so if you want more free organic search engine traffic focus on these. After the Google slap many marketers began to refocus their SEO efforts as they could not afford to pay the high PPC costs.
If you have been neglecting your website over the last few years while you tried PPC now would be a good time to give it a SEO makeover. Most websites can be improved with some simple changes, here are some easily fixes to common problems:
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.
2. This is the other side of the coin to point one above; the search engines love original content. Write some original content for your website; I don’t care how you do it, just do it! Hire some students, ask a relative, pay your kids, subcontract a free lancer or even do it yourself because it will be worth it. Try and write at least 700 words on each page and use good descriptive keywords relevant to your business.
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. 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. 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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