The Power of the Link

Posted on October 29, 2008
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I wrote yesterday about the steps you can take to get a high ranking in the search engines - a combination of content and linking.

Well if you are still in doubt then consider this.  Have you heard of Google Bombing? It’s a deliberate attempt to force a page to the top of a search engine - when it’s not setting out to target that phrase.

An example of this, before Google got wise and changed their algorithms, is when searching for the term “more evil than Satan himself” would return Microsoft to the top of the search engine.  Now that’s an unlikely term to be searching for I admit, and if you searched for the term “miserable failure” it would bring up the White House’ official site in no 1 place!

But some well known SEO experts in the US are now competing to the “the coolest guy on the planet“.  You’ll find Brad Fallon up at the top.   He’s one of the guys behind Stompernet - a membership only SEO and web optimisation course - a very expensive course at that. 

And his Stompernet co-founder Andy Jenkins - well he’s just content to be the second coolest guy on the planet.

Now, look what I found when I googled best UK affiliate blog.  Could this be a competition in the making…

How do I get on Page 1?

Posted on October 29, 2008
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Whilst I’m prepared to dabble with PPC I want visitors to come via the search engines too, so I’ve been working out what I have to do to get even vaguely visible.

As I understand it, it has to be a two pronged approach: content and linking.  So, lets explore this further:

What is content?

Apparently content is king.  Content is pages, content is information, content is words, content is keywords.  Without these things there is nothing for all the search engine bots to index.

If you provide good content you should create a sticky site - a site that people will return to and return to.  So whilst we’re talking about human visitors, they need well written content - grammatically correct, with headings and paragraphs and content that is all highly relevant to their search.

The search engines therefore take notice of page titles, headings as a guide to what the page is about - just like humans do. 

What is linking?

Linking is is what holds it all together!  It’s what joins the pages together - it’s what helps to create a sticky site - a natural path from page to page to page - or even site to site.

Humans like to be clearly led - they don’t want to be led blindfold - they are suspicious of what some websites contain - and equally they are made angry when there are broken links - or a link that leads to the wrong page.

I am using a link-cloaking WordPress plugin on this site, but that’s mainly because some of the links are affiliate links which sometimes to me look really suspicious with all the numbers and IDs in them.  If you mouseover one of my links you should see the words “secure_link” which I hope is a bit more reassuring.

To help with internal linking on this site I am also using a similar posts plugin.  I have set this text to appear at the bottom of every post - it will list 5 most related posts, and I also use it to provide a link to the previous post.  I don’t have much content on this site at the moment so some of the results are a bit way off to say the least but as the number of posts grow this tool will get a lot better.

This will also help to keep the search engines on the site longer - there is deep cross linking going on.

But it’s not all about internal linking - the value of the links coming in to your site should not be underestimated.  Search engines treat the links pointing at a page as a primary authority for what the target page is about.  You can have both one-way links, and reciprocal links - a kind of “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” thing!

There are ways to find out who is linking to who, and also find out what sites are using what keywords, which I’m delving into at the moment - and all I can say is that it’s interesting - very interesting.  Considering I’m writing this whilst watching Spooks - I feel like I’m carrying out my own espionage!  I’m my very own Spook!

So to sum it all up here’s a short list of things you/I need to do:

1. Pick a search phrase you want your page to rank for.

2. Choose a title for the page which includes, or is a variation for, the phrase you want to rank for.

3. Write a headline that confirms what the page is about.

4. Write your content - making sure it contains not only the exact phrase you want to rank for, but also the separate words in that phrase.  This helps everyone, humans and search engines understand what your site is about.

5. Create your internal links - using the navigation of the site - the main navigation menu, links in your footer, and of course a sitemap.  Also try and link your pages together within the content.

6. Go out and get some external links to your site.  This helps with ranking, but also with getting visitors from that site - cheeky!

So not much to it really!  Seems like a daunting task - considering I have about two pages written of my main site written at the moment!  If there’s anything I’ve forgotten please let me know!

Affiliate Resources - Affilistore 2

Posted on October 28, 2008
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Affilistore 2 offers a really quick and easy way to get an affiliate site up and running within hours.

I had a really good day on Friday last week.  After getting back from the  school run and putting the washing on, and then trawling through my emails I finally sat down at 11am to have a play with Affilistore.

I had already downloaded it - but it’s not like that takes any time in any case.  I then followed the really detailed instructions given here.

Now, I have three sites that I was thinking of using Affilistore on - all in the same vain and similarly brandable - so I decided I would do each step on each of the three sites at the same time.

By 1pm - I had the basis of three sites up and running!  I still had a lot of configuration to do, in order to get the store to display exactly what I wanted, a logo to come up with, etc but I reckon that if I had sat down at 9am and worked on one site all day then I would easily have one site up working properly.

From the looks of things Affilistore does well on the Search Engine Optimisation - but it could still be tweaked and you have to work on the datafeeds to produce your own unique content but if you wanted to run a Pay Per Click campaign to the site you could be earning money in little under 12 hours - I think that’s amazing.

The basic script is free to download and use, but if you don’t want to pay for it you have to put up with the 11 outgoing links in the footer.  I’m not prepared to give away that link juice so I will be stumping up the £100 to remove the footer links - because that’s a one off payment and applies to every site - so the more sites you have the cheaper it is.

The styling of the site is pretty simple - and there aren’t many skins available so customisation is all down to you but some people have done some pretty clever stuff and if you are any good with CSS and a graphics programme then you probably stand a chance of making something look more unique.

I’m not intending to use Affilistore as a price comparison site so my next task is really to go off and look at the merchants again - to look at the prices they charge and the commission I would earn and decide which one I should promote.

One of the things I was most concerned about when I learnt about affiliate marketing was how I would get product feeds into a site but Affilistore really does deal with this side of things really easily.  It would be easy to get a basic site up within 24 hours - allowing for styling and customisation.

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