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.

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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Make use of the nofollow tag in links that connect your non money pages to your money pages. Pages like the privacy policy, contact us etc should be linked using this parameter. It will stop page rank from being wasted, it can also be used in affiliate links. See below for details:

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Alter it to this by inserting rel=”nofollow” as shown below in the link

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7. Back links to your site is still the number one factor in determining your search engine position. The best way to achieve this is by submitting well written and original articles to the top article directories. The article should be between 575 and 800 words in lenght and contain a resource box linking to your website. Modify your articles as much as possible when submitting to different directories to avoid duplicate content issues.

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