PART 3 Affiliate Marketing for Beginners
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In the Beginning
Okay, we’re back to traffic, the goal is for visitors to see our sales copy or click our links. One way to do this if you have property online is through search engine optimization (SEO.) You may or may not have heard of this before, so here’s a quick rundown. In the beginning, when search engines were new (Northern Lights and Yahoo – directories were big) there came a couple of smart fellows who wanted to index the Internet and make it easier to access via search. As it became popular, people soon realized that Google was actually a hose for traffic on the Internet. Simply put, if you showed up high in a search engine result, you got people clicking to your site.
Thus began the cat and mouse game between Internet marketers and the search engines, with the former trying to do things to their website to rank higher and the latter trying to stop them. In the early days it was sometimes just a matter of stuffing your page with invisible text (keywords.) As time went on, the search engines got smarter and smarter, but so did those who practiced SEO. A whole industry sprung from search engines, with companies set-up to help other companies rank well in the search engines. While there are many intricacies that you must know (and have the ability to keep up with things that change quickly), there are only so many basic things you really need to know about SEO when it comes to affiliate marketing online.
On-site SEO
As mentioned, there are literally hundreds of different factors that play a role in how your website ranks, but here are the basic things you need to think about when it comes to on-site SEO.
- Meta Tags – Before you scoff that meta tags are no longer used by search engines (or think that they’re the ultimate in allowing you to rank), you should know that there’s quite a bit of confusion surrounding them. Basically, you’ll want to have them and make sure they’re unique. Being unique is key so that Google (and other search engines) see them as worthy of being ranked well. That said, the meta tags aren’t as important as having a unique meta description. This also might be what Google or other search engines use as the “snippet text” for your website in the SERPs. (Search Engine Results Pages.)
- Header Tags – You don’t want to wrap everything in H1 tags to make it seem important. (Think about it – if everything is important, it takes away from the value of being important.) That said, you’ll want to make sure you use H1, H2, H3 tags appropriately on your pages. The H1 tags should match your page title as (in the <title> tags) as closely as possible. Other than that, just use naturally to break-up or organize (outline) the content on your pages. It can help your users and the search engines.
- Do it for the Users – Google’s big advice can be summed up with asking yourself if doing something for your website will help end-users or if you’re doing it just for the search engines. There are flaws with that statement perhaps, but it’s a good place to start. By concentrating more on great content and giving people a reason to come to your website, you’ll reap the benefits – an audience that’s passionate about your website and that will help spread word of it via links (important, as we’ll see in the off-site SEO section.)
Off-site SEO
This deals with things outside of your website. So, we’re talking about what websites link to you basically. When it comes to this side of SEO, it’s all about the links. Over the years this has changed considerably, but it’s basically the same. The more sites that are of importance that link to you help determine how important your website is – i.e. where it will rank in the search results. Just a few years ago, Google became vocal about people buying and selling links to artificially inflate search engine rankings. Since that time, many things have been put into place that affect whether or not links are used for determining the value of your website to the search engines.
- Quality not Quantity – The best long term strategy is to try to acquire quality links rather than a large number of less valuable links. This brings up the question of what constitutes a good link. There are many factors that go into this – from Google’s PageRank of the page to the Alexa number of the page to what other websites share the IP address of the website to whether or not it’s on a .edu or .gov domain. When it comes down to it, it’s about common sense.
- Anchor Text – This refers to the actual text that is the link. This word carries some weight in describing what your website is about to search engines. As you can imagine, in the early years, this was abused, with people doing thousands of links with the same exact anchor text to rank for that phrase. Today, it’s much better to go for variety. Let other webmasters and bloggers link to you however they want. This is natural and doesn’t set off any alarms for Google or the other search engines. (Sometimes, it’s all about flying under the radar.)
Choose Your Hat Carefully
If you spend any time on marketing forums online, you’ll know that discussions of what “color” a particular method is are all over the place. Basically there are three – White Hats (by the book no bending the rules), Grey Hats (a little bending of the rules when necessary), and Black Hats (anything goes!) There are others as well according to some people, but these three sum up everything nicely. Instead of preaching to you about which path you should take, let’s just say that you should choose your hat carefully and know what to expect.
For example, black hat techniques are usually very powerful and can make some money, but they’re short lived and die quickly as they’re copied or just become wore out. If you’re reading about them in a forum or some schmuck is peddling an ebook about the latest greatest black hat technique, rest assured it’s been around the block a few times and is probably pretty much worthless. Same thing goes for the tips you find in forums and other places online. After the bust, you have to move on to the next big thing, either coming up with it or waiting around for it to leak out. So, there’s a benefit to these techniques, but a fairly large bad side as well.
Whatever path you decide to take, you should go into it knowing what the risks are. For most black hat techniques, they’re going to be short lived. Certain grey hat techniques will always be useful while others change every year or so. White hat methods are generally the same year after year – build content and worry about making the audience super happy. When your audience is happy, your website statistics are going to make you happy. You still have to make the sale once you get the traffic, but getting free organic search engine traffic is sometimes better than purchasing targeted traffic.