Top Seven Insider SEO Tricks to Boost Your Website Rankings
by Peter R. Doliaen
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.
2. As already mentioned the SE's (search engines) hate duplicated content but
love original content. One of the best ways to get more traffic for your site is
to add original content, however you can. Try writing it yourself or ask family
members, friends or relatives. You can try to hire students or sub contract a
freelancer to do it, but just do it!. Try and add at least 650 words to each
page using your keywords and some good descriptive test.
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
fortunately 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 likely to rank
for the page keywords. They will also again bleed rank from the important pages.
It is only necessary 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. 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:
<a href="http://www.website.com">Click Here For Info</a>
Modify it to this by adding rel="nofollow" in the link as below
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.website.com">Click Here For Info</a>
7. Writing articles and submitting 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.
Peter R. Doliaen is an internet marketer and an expert in search engine
optimization, he loves to get more search
engine rankings and is constantly on the lookout for the
best search engine
optimization tools.
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