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:
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 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.
Webmasters always say content is king. In fact, it is very true that the content in your website will have effect on the traffic of it. The importance of content is that it does not only attract visitors but also help the site to get a better search engine ranking. A natural question to follow is that how exactly the content will help to drive traffic to the website.
You will need informative and interesting content to pre sell the products to the visitors. The content can in fact help to increase the rate of conversion. Usually you will need to write informative articles related to your niche. By doing this, the potential customers will consider you an expert about the products and this will make the process of pre sell a lot more effective.
Once you make the visitors trust your expertise in the niche or on the products. They will tend to also trust what you say to them on your site. And you can make them click on the affiliate links without any difficulty. This implies that you will have a higher chance of making money. In fact, there are theories that you will be able to persuade them to make the decision of purchasing before they visit the merchant site if you can pre sell them well.
We have to face the fact that search engines can be one of our major sources of traffic. The content or articles can help you to get a better ranking on the search engines. If the spiders of the search engines find that the content in your site is highly related to a certain keyword, you will be have a better chance of getting the first few positions in the search results for that keyword. As a result, you should also try your best to optimize your articles.
You will also need to update your website with fresh content frequently. Keeping the site updated can attract the visitor to come to your site again. I bet you will not re-visit a site which has not been updated for years right. From this you will understand the importance of updating your site.
Adding new articles to your site is also very crucial if you want to get a better ranking in search engines. There is a theory that the ranking of a site is partly determined by the frequency of updating. As a result you should update your website frequently for both attracting visitors and search engines.
If you can have fresh and informative content in your website, other webmasters may want to link to your website since they also want to provide the visitors of their websites fresh content and informative materials. The back links from these webmasters will again help to boost you search engine ranking.
At this point you will know the importance of fresh content. Although writing is not an easy task, you will still need to do that since it is one of the things you must do in order to be a successfully affiliate marketer. Of course, as your website and business develop, you can consider outsourcing the work to the others!
About the Author:
Anson Hall is an author. You can learn more about Beginners Affiliate Marketing Tools from his website. Be sure to check Objective of Web log Analyzers. Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory
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