By Peter R. Doliaen

Many people in the internet marketing world got a rude awakening one day when the Google Slap came around, myself included!. They introduced a new parameter into their Adwords algorithum which measures the “quality” of the site that you want to buy clicks for. If the quality is considered too low they increase the cost of the clicks. In the same way Google had earlier cleaned out the doorway type pages from the organic search results, removing that source of cheap traffic as well.

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. One of the biggest problems webmasters have these days is the issue of duplicate content on their website. It’s a very common problem to have because it’s so easy to just copy and paste material from other sources onto your website. There maybe no copyright issue or problem but the search engines hate it and may de-index your pages into the supplemental results. Fix the problem by writing some original content and remove the offending content.

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. Most websites have non profitable pages, or pages that are not expected to rank in the search engines. Examples are the site map, contact us, privacy policy and disclosures pages. It is a big mistake to link these pages from every page on your site, there are several problems. The extra linking will degrade the link reputation for the pages they are on making them less likley to rank for the page keywords. They will also again bleed rank from the important pages. It is only necessay to link these pages from the home page, visitors will easily find them there.

5. Check that every page in your site has a different title and description, this is so important. It still amazes me to find web sites with titles like “New Page 1″ and “index.htm” etc. These are the default names generated by the web design application that was used. Another bad habit, for which I’m guilty, is to copy an existing page to use as a template then forget to edit the title and description resulting in many pages with the same title and description. Don’t be surprised if these pages don’t rank well in the search engines.

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. Writing articles and submiting them to the top directories is by far the best way to increase your 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.

About the Author:

Peter R. Doliaen is an affiliate marketer and an expert in SEO, he loves to get more search engine rankings and is constantly on the lookout for the best SEO ebooks.