2008 brings new challenges to the internet marketer; the internet is becoming a tough place to do business, or is it? Certainly it is if you have relied on cheap PPC from Google Adwords or organic search traffic from doorway pages, those days are now long gone. PPC traffic from the search engines is now becoming expensive, that is if you can even get your ads to display following the Google Slap.



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 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. 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 no follow 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 likely to rank for the page keywords. They will also again bleed rank from the important pages. It is only necessary to link these pages from the home page, visitors will easily find them there.

5. Check that every page in your site has a different title and description, this is so important. It still amazes me to find web sites with titles like "New Page 1" and "index.htm" etc. These are the default names generated by the web design application that was used. Another bad habit, for which I'm guilty, is to copy an existing page to use as a template then forget to edit the title and description resulting in many pages with the same title and description. Don't be surprised if these pages don't rank well in the search engines.

6. Make use of the no follow 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:

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.