Printing Australia

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.

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 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. 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. 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. Do not link to your site map, contact us, privacy policy, disclosures pages etc from every page on your site, just link from the home page. Firstly it is not necessary, if someone wants that info they will look 1st at the home page, secondly all those links will degrade your internal link reputation for your money keywords and this is not good for SEO. These pages will also bleed page rank away from the important pages in your site which you want to rank for.

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:

Click Here For Info

Modify it to this by adding rel="nofollow" in the link as below

Click Here For Info

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.

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