Over the years, quite a few clients have told me that search engines hate them. When search engines hate you, your web site is nowhere to be seen in the first 30 search engine result pages and has very low search engine referral traffic. This means that you are losing out on many newsletter subscribers and customers.

When I help my clients fix their relationship with the search engines, I often discover that the underlying problems are very similar. Review the list of typical problems below and see whether your site can use an SEO relationship expert:

• The web site contains too many ads and links to other web sites. Sometimes business owners get overly excited about the multitude of fine products and services on various other sites. In fact, that they want to tell their web site visitors about these products and services. Every single one of them (exactly 1,293 as of 5 pm yesterday).

Resist the temptation. While other web sites may indeed offer excellent resources, your web site should be all about you and your business. You may link to other web sites and products, but do so judiciously. Carefully weave relevant resources into the overall content of each web page.

Having links to a few products and resources that appeal to your target market is fine, but having 30 links on every page is too much.

• The web site has no real content. I have reviewed many solopreneur web sites that consist of just 3-4 pages. These include a Front page, a Newsletter page, an About Us page and a Contact page. Each page contains 5-6 sentences that haven't been changed since the web site was created three years ago.

Search engines like fresh content, and they like content that changes on a regular basis. It is not enough to have a few pages with a few sentences on each page on your web site. You need to add new content and update your web site on a regular basis.

A few ways to update your web site include updating your existing pages with fresh and relevant content, adding keyword-rich articles, and starting a blog on your web site. All of these will generate new content, something that both web site visitors and search engines love.

• The web site has no incoming web site links. Many major search engines evaluate your web site's popularity by counting the number of links that point to your site. The more popular your web site is, the better rankings it gets on search engines. And if your web site has no incoming links, search engines will not consider it a popular web site. Consequently, your search engine rankings will suffer.

You can get incoming links to your web site by syndicating your articles on other web sites and in article directories, by exchanging links with other web sites, and by including a link back to your web site in your signature, when networking online.

Follow the suggestions in this article to get additional search engine traffic to your web site. This will translate into more newsletter subscribers and clients.