Top Seven Insider SEO Tricks to Boost Your Website Rankings
Gone are the days when you could get easy traffic from the search engines using doorway type pages, or even cheap clicks using PPC such as Google Adwords. The recent Google Slap has made it now fairly difficult to promote affiliate programs using Adwords. Even if you have your own website it now has to meet certain quality standards or the click price goes up rapidly.
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. 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.
Get more free orangic traffic to your website by adding some original content, ususally add at least 500 words per page using keywords important to your business and some good descriptive text. The search engines will simply love this and if you do the basic page SEO requirements you will get listed. Be creative in how you generate the original content, you can pay students or even school kids, ask workers or employee’s, or even write some of it yourself. The key point is that it is original, it does not have to be Shakespeare.
3. Search engines also hate affiliate links, and believe me they can find them pretty quickly. Not only do they make your site look cheap if they have not paid you a penny in years they are a waste of time, get ride of them. Another issue with affiliate links is that they can bleed page rank from your page and site. Why give away one of your most valuable assets?, see point 6 below for a fix.
4. A big mistake many webmasters make is to link all their non-money pages from every page on their site. Pages like contact us, privacy policy, site map and disclosures are often linked from every page, this will degrade the effectiveness of your money keyword pages and they will not rank as high. In addition these pages will drain off page rank, which is very valuable, from your important pages and be wasted!.
5. Two of the most important parts of each page is the title and description, and each page should have unique ones. This is very important for SEO and will improve your rankings. Many webmasters either make the mistake or just forget to fix them when creating new pages. Task yourself with checking every page in your site and take a little time to write new titles and descriptions, the search engines will love it.
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:
Alter it to this by inserting rel=”nofollow” as shown below in the link
7. Writing articles and submiting them to the top directories is by far the best way to increase youe 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.