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.
The Google Slap, as it has been unofficially called, was the introduction of a new quality metric in the Awords system, the effect was that a lot of Adword users suddenly found that most of their keywords had become inactive overnight. The solution suggested by Google was to either improve the “quality” of the website you were advertising or increase the max cost per click that you were willing to pay. In some cases it was as much as $5 or $10 which many considered a slap in the face!
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 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.
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. Remove all those non paying affiliate links that have never made you a penny in years, the search engines hate them and they make your site look cheap. As well as that they are probably bleeding valuable page rank from your site unless you are using the nofollow parameter, see point 6 below.
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:
Modify it to this by adding rel=”nofollow” in the link as below
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.
