December 15, 2008

SEO Basics for Affiliate Marketers

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This day and age, having a website just isn’t enough. You may have heard that all you need to do is fill in your meta descriptions and you’re good to go. Unfortunately for you, search engine optimization, or SEO, is not that simple anymore.

Google is the mother load of all search engines, commanding roughly 70% of the market share. Google tends to be a trend setter that other search engines follow. For the most part, your focus should be on improving your search engine ranking within Google. When that happens, you’ll also find that your sites begin ranking better in the other search engines as well.

There are tons, and I mean tons, of different ways for your site to move to the top. Believe it or not, sometimes you just need proper keyword density and a fairly low competitive search phrase, and you’ll be good to go. Most of the time though, you’re going to need to do more; much more.

I do SEO for a living, so I could literally go one for days regarding all of the things that can be done from. However, for now, I’m just going to stick with the basics. First off, we need to figure out which keywords are going to be best for your website. There are a couple of keyword research tools out there such as SEO Book and Wordtracker. I am actually in the process of developing a similar tool to Wordtracker, but that will be announced at a later time:) Once you find your ideal keyword phrases, we want to make sure this is placed throughout your website. Mainly, you want this placed in between your title tags. Ideally, you’d like to have the keyword phrase placed in header font. Each image on your website allows you to include “alt” tags. Place your search terms in those tags as well! This is your basic overview for your on page optimization. You want to ensure your keywords are weaved into your content as well, but it’s important to remember that you need to speak to your customers first and foremost, not to the search engines.

Lets remember that having relevant and quality content that matches your keywords should be a priority. If you’re able to churn out quality content every day, or at least on a regular basis, you’ll accomplish two things. One, search engines will take notice and your content will be indexed quicker. Secondly, your visitors will keep coming back to see what’s new.

One last thing I want to touch on, is your link building strategy. To begin, I suggest submitting your site to various directories. You want to avoid link farms, and free for all pages. You’ll also want to avoid reciprocal link exchanges at this time. Perhaps down the road, you’ll find link exchange partners where it will work out, but it’s not something I would necessarily do for an affiliate website.

When you begin making money, or if you’d like to cut out the time requirements of link building, you can look to outsource this responsibility. I would suggest you try yourself first though, just so you know what it entails and have a better grasp of the process. This is your basic link building strategy. However, your link building can expand into several other aspects as well. Such as: commenting on blogs, forums, social networks, groups, etc. For your first few affiliate programs though, I would suggest keeping things simple.

This is a basic SEO overview for beginning affiliate marketers. If you’d like assistance or more detail regarding any of these principles, feel free to ask!

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients.

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