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.
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 your website has been in the doldrums now is the time to do a make over and get some more of that lovely free traffic, here are some of my top tips that you may not have known about:
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. 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. 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:
Click Here For Info
Change it to this by inserting rel="nofollow" in the link as shown
Click Here For Info
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.
Article Source: http://www.search-raven.com
About the Author
Peter R. Doliaen is an affiliate marketer and an expert in search engine optimization, he loves to get more search engine traffic and is always on the lookout for the best search engine optimization tools.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, which means you may freely reprint it, in its entirety, provided you include the author's resource box along with LIVE links (without "nofollow" tags).
by: PeterR.Doliaen
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