David Leonhardt’s SEO Marketing Express

Guest post by John Lamerton… 

Affiliate marketing refers to internet based marketing, where a business offers rewards for others directing traffic to their website. This may take a number of different forms, including the omnipresent advertising banner, text links and, in the case of less scrupulous advertisers, spam and adware. The vast majority of affiliate marketing is legitimate and can be extremely lucrative.

Affiliate marketing can also be very successful for the merchants themselves. Indeed the industry is increasingly taking the place of conventional online and offline marketing. Greatly improving a brand`s visibility, offering a reasonable and stable price for marketing, affiliate marketing is relatively easy to establish and appropriate for companies of all sizes.

Search engine optimisation - or SEO - has become a considerable industry in itself, and is the subject of much discussion. There are various techniques available which may maximise a website`s chances of appearing in search engine results, and ensure that those directed to the site are of a good quality. The golden rule is that in the world of SEO content is king. Without a considerable quantity of good quality and relevant content a website can only progress so far. In terms of the structure of this content, the most obvious place to start is in giving consideration to the titles used. Titles should contain important keywords, as they feature highest in search engine results. Use a description of the service being offered, rather than a simple name, otherwise there is a risk of losing traffic.

The body of texts should again focus on important keywords and phrases, ensuring the most likely variations of words or phrases are given hearing. Content should be relatively accessible, with no unnecessary jargon, simple ideas expressed simply, in short sentences and paragraphs. Subheadings often work well, but steer clear of lists where possible. Account for potential spelling mistakes, and use metatags - the code as `seen` by the search engine robots - to its fullest effect to better explain the content and focus of the page in question to the search engines. Also ensure that target phrases are emphasised in bold or strong tags a couple of times and that keyword density for each phrase is around 2-4%. Keep the spread of target phrases on any given page to a clear and narrow focus. Also ensure that you use the heading tags H1 and H2 and that your content is a minimum of 300 words in length - ideally between 500 and 1000 words or so per page.

Links on a website tend to improve rankings, as do links from other websites. In an ideal world these sites should themselves have good rankings with Google, so don`t be afraid to contact relevant sites in order to exchange links. Ideally offer third parties something of value in return for a link and try to link out from and gain links in from content pages rather than links pages or directories as the latter seem to be carrying less and less weight. Most importantly, ensure that your link partners are relevant for your audience and that they are linking to you using your preferred anchor text (search term).

Choose the style of affiliate marketing which is best suited, and don`t assume banner ads will work best. Banners are no longer as effective as they were, and the focus has tended to shift to content, as people increasingly search for quality writing as opposed to garish flashing banners.

Also research the options regarding Pay Per Click (PPC) and other affiliate marketing models, as their suitability varies between industries. With a little investment of time in finding the right affiliates and model for each particular case, affiliate marketing and extending into the world of content affiliates can work for many a business.

Matt Cutts, Google’s public face for webmasters and search engine consultants, has shown us how to do link bait.  Oops, I mean, how to do really good quality content.  Yeah, that’s what I meant to say.

Here is the link bait…I mean content:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/9-google-mobile-iphone-tips/ 

Note that it is a numbered list, and not a “top 10″ list.  Matt chose a top 9 list, which is just a little offbeat..  Note that there are plenty of illustrations.  And the text and images combined are useful - actually demonstrating how to do something - not just silly stuff (although sometimes I like silly stuff, too).

Matt submitted it to Digg: 

http://digg.com/apple/9_Tips_for_Google_s_New_Voice_Recognition_App_for_iPhone

As of now, it has 42 Diggs. 

Study it hard, becasue even if your content doesn’t get more than one or two Diggs, this is how the Google guru prepares his content, so you can’t go wrong posting something like this on your website. 

There now, Matt just got a link from me as a result of his quality content.  You see?  It works. 

I’ve been meaning to blog about your desperate need for sucky links for some time, because I have not seen this aspect of link quality discussed anywhere.

People approach me all the time asking for high-quality links.  Not surprising - who would want low quality links?  But if you ask an SEO consultant to build you only PR6+ links, consider what message that sends to the search engines.

At worst, Google will assume you are buying links to buy PageRank…and we all know how much Google loves link-buying to boost PageRank, don’t we.

At best, the search engines will think your site appeals only to some kind of an elite.  How else would you explain that only high PageRank (high traffic, high-trust, etc.) pages link to your website?  Why do smaller blogs not link there?  How come your website is not included in any normal directories?  Why does this website have no appeal to normal people…and why should we rank it if it has no popular appeal?

No, the search engines won’t ask these questions outright.  But remember that all algorithms are created to simulate what would be normal linking and trust patterns that real people would follow.  Having links only form high quality, top-ranked websites does not look normal.  It’s a giant red flag.

Ironically, the more high-quality links you have, the more poor quality links you need.

CAUTION:
By “poor quality”, I do not mean spammy websites.
I do not mean you should be on pages full of words related to
enhancing body parts and gambling away the kids’ inheritance. 

But I do mean, that you want links form websites with a variety of linking profiles, ones that might be new or might not be running any link-building campaigns, ones that we might consider much less significant.  In short, you want a normal linking pattern.

The ideal way to build links is still the tried and true…

Step one, create awesome content such as useful articles, instructional videos, samples and demos, all the things that are generally called “link bait”.

Step two, publicize this content.  If it really is good, many websites will link to it, including top-rated websites and many smaller less significant websites.  They will do it naturally. So you will have a natural linking pattern.

To answer the obvious question, yes you will surely want to put extra effort into publicizing your content to high-trust, authoritative websites.  But those links are the kind of links that less-significant website owners will follow, read and link to, as well.

So don’t forget to get links form a wide variety of insignificant websites as part of your link-building campaign.  With algorithms designed to simulate something like democracy, votes from “the little guys” count, too.

Over at the High Rankings Forum a couple weeks ago, the following question was asked:

“What’s the general consensus on padding your site pages with paragraphs of extra test just for Google or for better page rank? Does it work? I’ve always believed that web sites should be designed for humans and if done well, the search engines will find it. What’s the prevailing wisdom on this?”

You can see the original post at http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=37658 …but you won’t see my response.  It must’ve been one of those times when the Internet crashed on me as I was uploading my response.

So for what it’s worth, here it is.

First, you can place a trillion words on your page and it won’t help your PageRank…unless the words are such that will inspire others to think, “Hey, I want to link to this page!”  That’s what PageRank is all about. 

That being said, I am a big more-is-better believer both for the search engines and for real people.  Why? For search engines: If you replace 300 words with 800 words, and the words remain on-topic and keyword relevant, the following will most likely happen: 

1. Your keywords will show up more often.
2. Variations of your keywords will show up more often, as will synonyms that might not have fit into your shorter text.
3. Many other words will show up that could be part of long-tail searches.
4. It is possible that the amount of information on a page might even play a small role in  rankings. 

For humans: If you replace 300 words with 800 words, and the words steadily aim to provide increasing explanation/evidence as you scroll down, the following will most likely happen: 

1. Impatient doers will ignore everything below your first “click here” or other call to action, so the added text makes no difference to them.
2. Undecided people, who like your message but are just not sure, will keep reading and you have the chance to convince them.
3. Analytics (people who need lots of info to make a decision) will love you and will be much more likely to follow your call to action. 

There is no right answer to this, but for what it’s worth…write!  Write!  Write!

Last week, I reported on how BrowseRank goes beyond PageRank to rank websites according to user behavior.  I won’t repeat all that here, but the bottom line is that increasingly you will need to reduce bouncebacks from your website to the search engines.  A fe days ago I offered the first in a series of strategies to employ.  I am generally moving from most obvious to least obvious, so last week I offered tips on how web site design can keep more visitors on your site.

Today, we look at an almost as obvious strategy…

STRATEGY #2 - Write website content that keeps the reader reading.

Nothing in this post is revolutionary, but all of it is necessary.

1. Make sure the content is relevant.  Stay on theme.
2. Check and double-check your grammar and spelling.  Do as I say, not as I do!  This is crucial, because if people see a spelling mistake, they will wonder, even subconsciously, if your product also has flaws.  And they might leave to conduct a new search.
3. Make sure the content is useful.  We run a freelance writer’s service, and you would be amazed (or maybe not) at how many website owners come looking for optimized website content.  Quality?  Well, the writing has to be good (see tip #1 above), but it really doesn’t matter what we write, what message we offer, what information we include.  More important is that it is cheap.  I usually send those people over to GetAFreelancer.com.  They are missing the point.  Useless optimized content offers a very small benefit.  Useful optimized content offers so much more.
4. Answer all the questions.  This is something that takes a little more thought.  What questions do your visitors have?  Does your content answer them?  Questions could be about you, about your policies, pricing and shipping, and about what you offer.  Those are obvious.  But what about how to use your products?  Where they can be found?  Can they be used in cold Canada or hot Mexico?  What if a person is older, younger, thinner, wider, a newbie, a pro…what about all the possible questions that every niche or subniche of your customers might have.
5. Expanding on #4, can people easily find shipping info?  For instance, do you ship to Canada?  If I can’t find that out quickly, I won’t stick around.  Is pricing easy to find.  If I am already at the stage where I might be ready to buy, I look for pricing almost immediately.  If I can’t find it, I’ll search somewhere else.  In short, any content that your audience is likely to be searching for needs to be obvious and easy to find.
6. If your website is an ecommerce site, do you have plenty of descriptions and suggestions of how to use each product?
7. New and unique non-commercial content is also ideal, because that also engages a visitor.  Just make sure to read tip #1 above before creating an entertaining video or interactive game or photo gallery or top-ten list.  We recently redesigned the website of a steel-bending client, and tracked the click locations.  An amazing number of clicks were on a “samples of our work” link that is just a souped-up, funky slide show we created for them.  Yes, even an industrial website can be cool!
8. Remember to use small paragraphs.  Huge chunks of text make people’s eyes gloss over and they subconsciously reach for the “back” button.

From a site usefulness perspective, your content needs to first an foremost include the information visitors are searching for, so that they do not bounce right back to the search engine.  Secondly, it needs to engage readers so that they stay on and make a purchase…and at least if they do bounce back to the search engine, it’s after a long visit on your site (signaling that the site was useful for them).

Phew! I just finished removing all the broken links from this website. It would have been a fairly small undertaking if not for the blog. The blog creates hundreds of pages and the broken links can appear in comments, posts, sidebars and all sorts of hidden files. And since broken link checkers report all sorts of anomalies, such as RSS links, the list to wade through is quite large.

But it is worthwhile. A website that points to a lot of broken links is one that is not maintained. Put quite simply, if Google has the option of listing two equally relevant websites for a particular search, why would it list the one that appears not to be as up-to-date. I have no empirical evidence to show that broken links hurt ranking (if you do, please let me know), but common sense says that somewhere in the algorithm broken links play a role.

A couple days ago I wrote about how blogs are good for SEO.  Today, I would like to offer one additional reason.

RSS.

RSS helps your SEO efforts in two ways.  First, you can submit your feed to RSS-specific directories, and that of course brings a number of links to yet another page on your domain.  That is good, especially for a new website that lacks the credibility to be referenced in blogs and portals, and lacks the link-juice most link-exchange partners seek.  One caveat is that some RSS directories will accept only tried and true feeds, so you might have to go back a year later when you have proven yourself.

In addition to the link-juice that RSS offers, if your content is good and you take your blog seriously, those RSS directories should generate traffic.  The number of people who take advantage of RSS feeds is small, but these are Internet diehards.  These are people with voracious appetites for information and are more likely to buy over the Internet than the typical surfer.   Many of them are bloggers themselves who use RSS as a means of gathering research and ideas quicker than by surfing.  Exposing your blog feed to them is a great way to build the best links of all - natural ones that your website earns because of its superior content.

Content alone won’t win the SEO battle.  But content publicized can.  And RSS is a means of publicizing.

Just a few reasons why a blog is a great tool for SEO.

• Fresh content - the search engines love that.
• Growing website - the search engines love that, too.
• Multiple variations of keywords to attract highly-targeted long-tale searchers.
• Highly relevant pages from which to link into the main pages of your website.
• Keeps you in touch with your topic, not just the technicalities of SEO.
• You can submit your blog to blog-specific directories, providing extra link love.
• You can easily trade content, not just links.
• Assuming you can generate even a modest amount of traffic for your blog, you can get links to individual posts through social bookmarking (especially if you have a tool like TheBookmarketer at the bottom of each post, as I do).
• Blog open doors to real-people networking on the Internet, and that is always helpful when it comes to link-building and other forms of collaboration, such as blogrolls and webrings.

There are probably a few dozen more reasons why blogs are good for SEO, so why not post your favorite reasons in the comments section below?

Not everybody has this happy problem, but many websites get traffic they cannot use because it serves only a narrow spectrum of people who arrive from a broader search.  People do a search for a broad search, such as “marketing gimmicks” at Google or Yahoo, find your web page about a very specific marketing gimmick for real estate agents, discover that the website does not address their needs to market beauty products or metal bending or accounting, and they go.

Wait.  Stop.  Where do they go?  Back to the search engine?  No, no, no, no. 

From an SEO perspective, you don’t want to send the search engines the message that your page was a poor choice to rank well for the search term “marketing gimmicks”.  If that happens, the search engines might just demote your rank, and you will love the good prospects with the “useless” traffic.  We have no evidence that the search engines are factoring bounceback data into their algorithms, but we do know they are capable and have an interest in doing so.   It’s coming.

Of more immediate concern is all that hard-earned traffic that could be buying something from you is just leaving without spending a penny.  What a shame!  In a case like that, it would be worth having a very prominent affiliate link to a website that sells a broader marketing package with a text like “More Surefire marketing Gimmicks Here”. The result would be to convert some of the “useless” traffic, and to both reduce the bounceback rates and increase the bounceback lag time of those who do go back to Google.
 

Today I just want to share with you Jason Lee Miller’s list of what works as good link bait and ideal for viral marketing.  His whole article is great and can be read here, but this is the list I thought I would share directly with readers. 

The Resource Approach (Becoming the Expert In Your Field/Niche)

–    Create expert articles/lists/data sheets 
–    Create practical or fun tools
–    Write How-To articles
–    Create a comprehensive blog roll (give link love, get link love)
–    Compile informative news stories and articles

The News Approach

–    Get the scoop. Be first with industry news
–    Interview prominent people in your field
–    Investigate a hot topic
–    Do an exposé

The Humor/Novelty Approach

–    Post funny/interesting/amazing photos related to your industry
–    Create humorous/unique videos (Use Blendtec for inspiration)
–    Create lists; people love lists – Top 10 Ways to…; 10 Signs You’re…