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!

Many internet marketing people have given up on PPC as it is becoming too expensive and almost impossible to make money with. A better solution is to try and get more free organic traffic from the major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three account for 85-95% of the search traffic out there.

Most website can be improved in terms of SEO with a little work, if you have been neglecting your site over the last few years now would be a good time to do a make over. Here are some quick fixes that you can make:

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. 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. Two of the most important parts of each page is the title and description, and each page should have unique ones. This is very important for SEO and will improve your rankings. Many webmasters either make the mistake or just forget to fix them when creating new pages. Task yourself with checking every page in your site and take a little time to write new titles and descriptions, the search engines will love it.

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.