Seven SEO Insider Tips That Can Increase Your Search Engine Rank
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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.
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!
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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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