It seems like the SEO world has changed and so will the internet marketing world. With the large amount of old and outdated content out there it can be hard for newcomers to find solid advice and gain a foothold. There are many techniques that just don't work anymore yet they are still being pushed and/or sold to people who don't know any better.

There are tons of things you can do to improve an old site, like refresh the design, add more content, refresh the content that is there, add more interactive features, improve the on and off-page SEO, but this article will focus on analyzing the traffic the site is getting and finding quick and easy places to make improvements. We are talking like 20 minutes here.

Google has been harping about quality content for a while now. They want great content and will provide the best search results to the people who have it (in theory). Of course there are millions of examples showing garbage content at the top of the SERPs but they are slowly improving and are better than the alternatives.

We all have been looking closely at the way we build links and have been doing SEO lately because of Penguin. Many of us have seen our sites tank because of poor link building practices. Some of us simply didn’t know any better or did some foolish things a few years ago that ended up affecting our sites today.

Well I suppose if you play around with grey-hat techniques you end up getting burnt eventually. But even white hat techniques can get you in trouble these days. One of my better niche sites got the Google slap last week and probably won’t come out of it for a couple months or more. Here’s what I’ve learned from the experience.

Crowded niches can be extremely difficult to get started in but also happen to be the most interesting and most lucrative. Whether you have a passion and want to write about it, have a business in a crowded niche you need to promote, or simply want to make money, it takes lots of time and persistence but it can be done.

For a brand new website, optimizing for local search can be the first and easiest way to get relevant traffic. There are plenty of ways of driving traffic to websites but local search is best for small businesses looking to use their websites to gain new clients or sales. The traffic won't be staggering but will be highly relevant which ultimately is what is important.

You can tell a lot about how well a new website will do in the search engines right away, by how long it takes to get indexed by Google. How long it takes, which pages get indexed first, and what terms the new site gets indexed for in Webmaster Tools will tell you if you have a real challenge ahead gaining search results or if it will be easy.

Even if you don’t do it, you’ve probably thought about it. All designers, especially freelancers would love to have one or multiple passive income streams. Building a small army of niche sites containing ads and affiliate links seems pretty gimmicky, and yet it works for some people. Being web designers we are also pretty set up with a whole lot more tools than your average person. We can build the sites, write the copy and do our own SEO.

When you hear of SEO a couple things come to mind and none of them are very good. I mostly think of shady and dishonest practices, gimmicks and other cheap methods to game the search engines. The very nature of SEO is to artificially inflate search results higher than where they should be. And right about this time some white hat SEO'ers jump in and say, hey what about us.