Top Seven Insider SEO Tricks to Boost Your Website Rankings
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.
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. 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. 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. Writing articles and submiting them to the top directories is by far the best way to increase youe search engine rankings and hence free organic traffic. This SEO technique still works providing that you do it right, articles must be at least 525 words and be original. It must also have a resource box with links back to your site that contain your required keywords. You must also modify each article for each directory to avoid duplicate articles from being circulated.
