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. If you have copied and pasted content from other websites onto your own you will likely have a big duplicate content problem. The search engines, particularly Google, hate duplicate content and it can get your site banned or at least de-indexed from the search listings. If your pages are in the Google supplemental index then this could easily be the cause of it. The fix is to remove the content and replace it with some original content of your own writing.

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. 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. 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. 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:



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



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.