Seven SEO Insider Tips That Can Increase Your Search Engine Rank
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!
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. 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. Many websites still keep affiliate links for years even though they have never made any money from them, if this is you get ride of them. If they are none productive not only do they make your site look un-professional they can also bleed valuable page rank from your site. If you want to keep them fortunatley there is an easy fix, see below for details.
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. 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. 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:
Modify it to this by adding rel=”nofollow” in the link as below
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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