Online Marketing Articles

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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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

Change it to this by inserting rel=”nofollow” in the link as shown

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.

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Tags: SEO