March 5, 2008
7 Insider SEO Tips To Booast Your Website Traffic
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!
So for many the only practical solution, and in my opinion the best, is to get more free organic traffic from the search engines. We are taking about Google, Yahoo and MSN as between them they account for about 90-95% of all the searches performed.
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. 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. 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. It is important that every page in your site has a unique title and description, don’t bother with the keyword meta tag. manually check, or do some sort of search with your web design tool to check that you don’t have pages called “New Page 1″ (created by Frontpage!), or index.htm etc. Also check that you don’t have pages with duplicate titles and descriptions, this is easy done when you copy one page and use it as a template for others. Don’t expect these sorts of pages to do well in the rankings.
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:
Change it to this by inserting rel=”nofollow” in the link as shown
7. The best way by far to boast your rankings and get more traffic is by writing original articles, about 550 to 750 words, and submitting them to the top article directories. Of course you must also include your resource box with each article with links pointing back to your site. Does article writing work?, yes absolutely but the key is to make sure that your article is original and secondly do not submit the same article to more than one directory.