Guest Article by Brendon Scott SEO Guru
SEO – the affiliates friendFor those that don’t know me, my name is Brendon Scott. I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing in general, and the A4U forum specifically since September 2003 (is it REALLY that long?). I’ve been a moderator at Webmasterworld (http://www.webmasterworld.com/), and I’m often known as “TallTroll”.There are plenty of ways to get traffic as an affiliate. They all have their pros and cons, but SEO seems to be one of the most misunderstood by affiliates (and a lot of other people). Organic traffic is the Holy Grail of internet marketing – free eyeballs that can be monetised at 100% margin, an endless fresh supply of users to click on your links, see your banners, sign up for your newsletters, and generally make you obscenely rich with little or no effort on your part.
Except, it hardly ever works out like that, does it? Google hates you, and 12 months after you start your site it will only just barely acknowledge your existence. Yahoo is at best a bit frosty – they send you enough traffic to get the odd sale, enough for a taste of what could be without ever actually delivering, and MSN just bemuses you.
It shouldn’t be like that. SEO should be the affiliates friend. I’ll let you into one of the biggest secrets in SEO – it took me years to learn it, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around too much :
Most of SEO is easy
OK, getting number one across all engines for “online casino” is actually quite tricky, but getting good rankings for just about any generic, 2 word term can be hard. It’s also unnecessary. For any affiliate, the objective is to make money. Maybe you just need enough to cover hosting fees on your hobby sites, maybe it’s your main source of income. Wherever you fall in the spectrum, you need to work out
- Where DOES your traffic come from? What keywords or groups of keywords, which search engines?
- Where would you LIKE your traffic to come from? Maybe MSN traffic converts 3 times as well as Google, and you should concentrate on that for a while. Maybe Google just provides so much that it’s not worth worrying about anything else
- Most importantly, which of these makes you money? Being number #1 in Google is great – but unless you actually get commissions from the traffic, it is literally worthless. If you’re earning more from a #3 ranking in Yahoo, where do you think you should focus your efforts?
Once you can answer those 3 questions, you should be able to see which search terms you should focus on, and in which engines. That’s when the work of SEO begins.
Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start to plan the how. The most important thing to remember about search engines (SEs) is that they are very, very stupid. You have to tell them things over and over again over a period of time, preferably in several different ways.
Firstly, let’s make sure that the SEs can see your site correctly. Don’t use frames on your site – spiders (the software that search engines use to read and understand your site) can have trouble with them. Use the www or non-www version (http://www.example.com/ vs. example.com) of your site as the main version, and redirect the other one to it. It’s not hard to do (your web host may be able to help, and it’s quite easy to find good tutorials on the technicalities on the web if not). This stops the spiders from “seeing” 2 versions of your site, and thinking you have duplicated it. Use a 301 redirect to do that, it’s easiest for the spiders to interpret correctly.
Secondly, lets make sure they think that the site should rank for the keywords we identified. At the most basic level, search engines look at 2 sets of data to decide which site should rank for a particular term : the content of the site itself (often referred to as “on-page factors”) and the links pointing to the site, domain age etc (known as “off-page factors”).
On-page factors are fairly easy to deal with. Firstly, try and make sure that the word / phrase that you’d like a page to rank for is in the HTML title of the page. Don’t go overboard, trying to cram it in where it doesn’t fit; just let it flow naturally. The HTML title is also used by SEs as the link from their results to your site, so if your title looks spammy, it may put people off visiting you.
Use header tags (<h1>, <h2> etc) to break up your content, and try and use the target phrase in those as well. Use the keyword in your copy on the actual page itself, but don’t go overboard – writing a keyword block of keyword text that just doesn’t keyword flow, can keyword really put off keyword users.
Also, remember that search engines want to see sites that people tend and care for – using the same title, meta description and carefully keyword stuffed text for every single page looks like a heavy sales pitch, and gets about the same reaction as you’d expect. That kind of duplicate content issue can badly affect sites based on datafeeds – and seeing the same datafeed wrapped up in many different templates is also quite off-putting for the search engines.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use datafeeds, but it DOES mean that you should think about what you are going to add to the datafeed to make it different from the other 1000 sites using it, what makes it unique. In the same way that each of your pages needs care and attention to make it noticeably different from the others, your whole site needs to stand out from the crowd.
Off-page factors can be harder to grapple with. Without going into a LOT of complicated mathematics, pretty much all of the off-page part of an SEs algorithm can be summarised in one question :
Why should I trust you?
Lots of websites want to be #1, but only one can be. What makes your site the best? You can argue about whether you’ve got the best content or not with a human, but SE spiders aren’t human – they are stupid machines. They can’t tell if you’ve spent hundreds of hours carefully crafting the definitive guide to left-handed widgets throughout the ages – to them, its just a string of characters with associated term vectors.
What they can do though, is something no human can. They can “see” the whole web at once (or a big enough fraction of it to be close to all of it) and see the patterns. Who links to who. When they linked to each other. When links change. When new sites appear. When old ones disappear.
From all that apparent chaos they can see the sites that consistently get voted for (linked to), and which ones are all on their own. They can see the communities of related sites, which ones are stingy with their links to others, and which ones are generous. If your site is in the middle of the flow, at the centre of all the strands, it will be rewarded.
One of the most common mistakes I see affiliates making in SEO terms is not linking to other sites enough. SEO is actually a very social discipline. The WWW is supposed to be a conversation. If your site is stood in the metaphorical kitchen of the internet party, it won’t be highly regarded. Link out, freely and often. It may feel wrong, but people (and a few dumb machines) will notice.
So what’s the take home message here? What can you actually DO about any of this? Lets say, for the sake of argument, that you know that your site makes money from “left handed widget” traffic coming from Google, since that’s where the left-handed widget users seem to hang out. You’d like them to visit your site, and buy their widgets from a merchant you promote, through one of your affiliate links.
You need to make your pages stand out from each other, and maybe from other sites using the same data you are. That means writing meaningful, descriptive titles and descriptions for your pages. It means thinking about what each page is for, what is it trying to say? It means making sure it says that. It means linking to other sites that your users might find useful, or interesting, and asking others whose users might find your site interesting to link back to you. Eventually, you’ll find you don’t even need to ask any more, it’ll just happen.
As an affiliate, you should be doing some or all of these things already.
SEO can be your friend, if you let it be.
Bredon’s SEO Blog SEOAssassin
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A great post!!
It’s always good to hear from an expert as it very often helps to alliviate any fears and confirm that we are doing things in the correct way. Thanks for that – much appreciated.