SEO. Search Engine Optimisation. Do Not Be Frightened.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation can conjour images of the black arts and voodoo medicine, I have previously said SEO is Easy, in a kind of Hitchhikers Guide / Don’t Panic way.

Hopefully I can be a little more constructive here and give some pointers on how to get majour Search Engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask et al to notice and rank your site in a more positive light.

SEO from a proper Search Engine Optimisation company should never be ignored as a possibility but for many hobbiests and low turnover companies it can be an expensive excersice. Try some of the below SEO tips and hopefully you can get your site attracting the Search Engine bots and making a shave more money so you can afford professional SEO.

Step 1: Do Your Homework (Keyword Research)
The keywords you think your customers would type in to search for your products or services are not always what they do use? A keyword or more precicly key phrases should be investigated with a fresh view.

Make a list of 20-30 keywords or phrases you believe your users might use, or ones that seem prominant onn your competitions websites.

Group them into sections or categories that can be directly reflect to pages on your site. Take the words / phrases and plug them into the google keyword tool. Copy the (popular) words into a text file or spreadsheet tab, save and name related to the appropriate section / page on your site.

You should build up a library of popular keywords and now you are ready to look at your current website content

Step 2: Web Copy
Web copy refers to all the words or text on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases you have listed on step 1 need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince those search engines that your content is highly relevant to those keywords. Repeat a couple of times but make sure the end text is READABLE to a human

Tips of best places to use your chosen keywords

• Page title, both the TITLE tag and the H1 page headings

• If you can the URL of the page, can you see SEO mentioned in your URL bar above?

• Keywords Phrases and Key messages should occour more at the top of the page. Helps with both SEO and generating interest with users.

• STRONG Bold or EM italicise your chosen phrases

Remember, you are doing this for all key pages, start at the index page, and work out.Search Engine Optinisation is about ALL pages not just your default.

It’s also good to bear in mind that search engines can only read text, not pictures. Often web developers embed words in images to look better for website visitors or use Flash for animation, but this is a major impediment to search engines.

Step 3: Links. Aka Off Site SEO
Relevant links from relevant external (not your) web pages are as key as the content.

Hundreds of directories are out there and it is often simple to get links back from these, but relevant links are best. These should be thought of first. Industry specific directories can be good, but link exchanges with relevant sites may be good.

If you sell blue widgets only and you know another website selling red widgets only a link swap might be hugely beneficial. If someone sells the same thing as you you might want to rethink asking for a link exchange as it might be a conflict of interests for both parties.

List the websites and contact details for all likely candidates for a link swap. Put a link to them on your website then ask politly for a link back.

Keep An Eye On What Happens

Make sure you are using a  statistics program to collect data about who if visiting your site, how they are using it, where they came from (site link, search engine etc) and what keywords they used if visiting from a search engine.

React to this. Keep a log, when you make a major change see if visits improve compared to the same page in the last few months, be wary of seasonal products though as there may be seasonal variation, expect a christmas tree sales page to drop traffic in January, if there has been a change work out why, what have you changed? What may have changed? Is this a seasonal product?

A package like the excelent and FREE Google Analytics can tell you all this.

Remember, make a change, see what it changes, if for the better keep the change, if not roll back to a previous version of the page.

March 28th, 2010 Posted by admin | SEO | one comment

Dos and Don’ts For An Affiliate Newbie

Don’t

1) Wade into PPC.

2) Promote a product purely due to high commission

3) Expect to make thousands of pounds a month for 6 hours work a month. (yes this is possibl, not easy and does require some investment of time and money - for more on this check this book out)

4) Don’t spend money!

Obvious exception is buying a domain name and web hosting. Even then as you may only be dipping your toe in the water there are many good hosts that do webhosting for less than £3 a month. Build and experiment.

DO.

1) Plan.

Take your time, plan and research your market. Read affiliate marketing blogs and forums like A4U.

2) Do.

Take action. Research is great and powerful, but there comes a time when you need to get that site up and running.

3) Write

Even in this age content is still king, write readable articles on subjects consistent with the theme of your site.

4) Promote.

submitting to search engines is not enough. Produce press releases, and use social networks.

5) Have fun!

There is alot more to learn, but taking those first steps are very important.

March 19th, 2010 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing | no comments

SEO It Is Easy

Onsite SEO, was once seen as a real black art.
But the simple truth is that a the few guidelines that make good onsite search engine optimisation have not changed since spiders first infested the web.

The first key point is USE QUALITY CONTENT. This rule has never changed and if it is not obvious why textual quality content is important read on.

The textual content is the most important thing in SEO. Getting the words on the page. It is the words that spiders pick up on and build the search engine’s database with. Write content. Make it appealing to the reader, make it relevant. Yes SEO gurus will say about constructing the text with keyword density at a level of 2% - 4%, sneeking in word variaitions etc. This is all well and good, but if you produce a quality article, there should be that mix of ‘long tail‘ keywords and other key phrases any way. Plus if it is interesting and doesn’t look like it has been written by a robot it will attract interest and links in.

Yes use H1 tags to convey your key subject / article title. and use H2 tags to outline other sections, important to the visitor.

Use an interesting and relevant meta title. Again use keywords, but also make it snappy and draw the user in.

Meta descriptions and keywords are still used, but are a very small part of what needs doing.

Key messages in BOLD, again this helps readability, you only have 1/2 a second to draw the reader in. Also Search Engines have been known to pick up these words and weight them more for the article.

Use ALT tags on images, search engines still cannot read images (though I bet google is working on this)

Add new stuff to your site, new articles, more textual content. Keep the Search Engines interested as well as the visitors. 2 articles a week should be minimum for a blog.

Linking structure on your website is key. Every page should have consistent navigation linking to the home page and other major sectios of your site. Blogging Software and Content Management Systems are fantastic for this.

So will you take advice from this site? Not one for rules, this is a blog site, free flow of thought. Maybe you are better off buying a Search Engine Optimisation book, with their rules, formulas, systems and black magic (hmmm chocolate).

March 11th, 2010 Posted by admin | SEO | one comment

Is ClickBank Irrelevant for UK affiliates?

First - what is ClickBank?

Clickbank is a marketplace for virtual goods. The ebooks and software are marketed by high commissions (usually over 50% affiliate commission) but has attracted alot of rubbish. Recycled PLRs, resell right ebooks, affiliate systems, getrich systems and so on.

Infact there is a high proportion of self serving affiliate programs on clickbank - things like the CB Affiliate Formula that tells you how the author mad $52,000 dollars in Clickbank commissions in 4 weeks. Most of these have the long sales letter that seems to actually work (in the USA, 10 years ago?) and have screen shots of fantastic clickbank earnings.

There is actually some good stuff on the ‘network’ but it takes a long time to plough through the dross.

My motives for this post is to actually get an idea if it has ever actually really worked for anyone, especially in sales to the UK within the last year.

Yes I have an account  and yes I have tried to push some products, but have actually found better results selling ‘real’ products through affiliate networks like Affiliate Future, Affiliate Window, Online Media Group, Paid On Results et al.

March 3rd, 2010 Posted by admin | affiliate | no comments

Affiliate Window and Buy.at

London-based Digital Window creates UK’s largest affiliate marketing network.

Digital Window today acquired Newcastle-based Perfiliate Ltd., which operates one of the leading affiliate marketing networks under the brand name Buy.at. Together Digital Window and Buy.at form Britain’s largest performance-based marketing group, serving customers in the UK, USA and Scandinavia. Buy.at was previously part of AOL Inc.

Kevin Brown, CEO of Digital Window: “This transaction is a milestone not only for Digital Window, but also for the performance marketing industry as a whole. Both companies already excel in the areas of service, ethics and technology. Joining forces enables us to harness the passion and creativity of both businesses to the benefit of all our partners.

Read the full Affiliate Window press release here

What implications does this have to the UKs affiliate networks?

Well time will tell, but I am hoping this is a good thing. It would be brilliant if buy.at would run as a seperate network to Affiliate window but I expect one of two things will happen:

Bye, bye Buy.at. Possible. Both systems merge and the best of buy.at is ported onto the affiliatewindow back bone. But this would mean alot of work and I expect such a merging of systems would mean loss of jobs on one side or the other.

Or both networks proceed as complimentary networks, maybe they both take on select individual marketing verticles.

Both are possible, but my opinion is not worth much on these, waiting for comment from Lee McCoy, and already seen some very positive views from Here.org.uk. There will probably be a large selection of other ideas on what might happen to these affiliate marketing networks. Might be exciting times, though sometimes diversity is the best way forward.

Keep diversity. If you are members of both of these networks and no others join the likes of Affiliate Future, Paid On Results and  Profitistic. Remember, that 20% rule!

March 1st, 2010 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing, buy.at, affiliatewindow | no comments