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.
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!
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.
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. If you have copied and pasted content from other websites onto your own you will likely have a big duplicate content problem. The search engines, particularly Google, hate duplicate content and it can get your site banned or at least de-indexed from the search listings. If your pages are in the Google supplemental index then this could easily be the cause of it. The fix is to remove the content and replace it with some original content of your own writing.
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. Search engines also hate affiliate links, and believe me they can find them pretty quickly. Not only do they make your site look cheap if they have not paid you a penny in years they are a waste of time, get ride of them. Another issue with affiliate links is that they can bleed page rank from your page and site. Why give away one of your most valuable assets?, see point 6 below for a fix.
4. Most websites have non profitable pages, or pages that are not expected to rank in the search engines. Examples are the site map, contact us, privacy policy and disclosures pages. It is a big mistake to link these pages from every page on your site, there are several problems. The extra linking will degrade the link reputation for the pages they are on making them less likley to rank for the page keywords. They will also again bleed rank from the important pages. It is only necessay to link these pages from the home page, visitors will easily find them there.
5. It is important that every page in your site has a unique title and description, don’t bother with the keyword meta tag. manually check, or do some sort of search with your web design tool to check that you don’t have pages called “New Page 1″ (created by Frontpage!), or index.htm etc. Also check that you don’t have pages with duplicate titles and descriptions, this is easy done when you copy one page and use it as a template for others. Don’t expect these sorts of pages to do well in the rankings.
6. Make use of the nofollow tag in links that connect your non money pages to your money pages. Pages like the privacy policy, contact us etc should be linked using this parameter. It will stop page rank from being wasted, it can also be used in affiliate links. See below for details:
Alter it to this by inserting rel=”nofollow” as shown below in the link
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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