With Google continually making changes to the layout of their first page of results and rolling out updates to punish low-quality pages, it has never been more essential to use every technique at your disposal to compete for a top spot. If you’re a website owner or SEO practitioner, then you know that’s it’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest developments, and that’s why today we’re going to go over how to roll-out an SEO for Video strategy that will help you rank highly and improve your traffic.
Affiliate marketing[1] has been big business for almost as long as the Internet has been around, but the business is constantly changing. The core idea behind affiliate marketing remains the same as it’s always been – get lots of traffic to your offers, and build a great sales page so that the traffic converts.
Sadly, getting traffic is becoming more and more difficult. The size of your audience is expanding, but the number of people that are running affiliate sites is expanding too, and the search engines are cracking down on a lot of the older, spammy link-building techniques. This means the blog commenting bot you saw advertised on that affiliate forum won’t do much for you. However, there are a lot of other ways to build links. Here are a few ideas for you.
Content Marketing
Far too many affiliates focus on picking out a huge list of products, building sales pages, and hoping for the best. It is possible to succeed with a huge network of products and sites, but there’s a good chance you’ll burn out if you do this. Instead of trying to make money off a huge network, why not focus on a handful of products that you truly love, and genuinely believe in.
Content marketing[2] means creating awesome content that your competitors simply can’t match. Instead of just putting together a sales page, add value. Write reports that actually inform or entertain. If you sell protein powders, write an app that people can use in the gym to track their workouts. If you promote dating sites, run an agony aunt style column that provides genuinely useful dating advice. Sales pages don’t get links, great content does.
Quality Links
If you are going to go out and seek people to exchange links with, don’t waste your time on link lists, top ten sites, spammy blogs, or barely related, low traffic sites. Pick high quality sites with content related to yours, and send personal emails to the owners of those sites. Make it obvious that you’ve read their site, and take the time to explain what your site is and why they should link to it. Link exchanges do work, but you’ll need to put some work in to earn quality links.
Guest Posting
Guest posting[3] is a great way to earn natural-looking links to your site from a range of other sites. Next time you’re reading an affiliate forum, see if you can spot some site owners that work within your niche and would be interested in taking posts from you. While you’re browsing the web for leisure, look out for blogs that you like reading, and take a look at their about page. If they accept guest posts, send them something.
Make sure that the post you write is interesting, well written, and useful. Yes, it takes time to write good posts, but it’s worth it if you want to develop a good name for yourself online.
Product Reviews
Product reviews are essential for affiliates. If you want consumers to buy the product you’re promoting, you need to prove that they can trust it. Build up a relationship with a few good reviewers, and send them samples for your best products.
Giveaways and Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a good way to build buzz around your product. You can start fairly small; use your social media profile to promote some giveaways, and ask people to comment on your profile, share your content, or post something interesting (a funny image related to your niche, a poem, a short video – anything easy to create that will attract viewers), in return for an entry into a completion for a free product. Crowd sourcing is a great way to get organic links to your product pages, and it can be good PR too!
Wayne Barker writes for the affiliate marketing forum Twist. With a bustling community at Twist you are bound to find the information that you need to succeed.
Resources:
1. Affiliate marketing – Wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
2. Content marketing – Wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
3. The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging – Kissmetrics.com
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-guest-blogging/
SEO’s place in Internet marketing is firmly entrenched. No internet marketing campaign begins without a discussion about the SEO strategy. A few years back, SEO work comprised just a small percent of an Internet marketer’s job. Today, situation is much more different. This isn’t surprising considering the fact that there are more than 3 billion online searches every day[1] and that’s almost double comparing with 2011. People use search engines to find more about the products and services that they need and research shows that they more or less view only the first page of a search engine’s results. This has lead to a high page rank being the holy grail of Internet marketing.
Research has proved that most users review only the top 3-5 results returned by a search term. Search engine technology has advanced to the point that in most cases, the top 3 results offer exactly what the user is looking for. This means that good results that show up in the 2nd page of results are usually ignored and never get much web traffic. Research has also shown that people are now used to filtering out the paid search results[2] because of the distinctive colored box they appear in. Thus it is the challenge of every Internet marketer to reach the top of the rankings organically, preferably by using white hat optimization techniques.
In the early days of the widespread use of the Internet, it was easy for businesses to perform SEO for their websites on their own. Now SEO is a field all unto itself. The changes that happen in this industry are rapid and are directed by the search provider’s advances to combat spam in results. The work that is required is phenomenal and in most cases requires a team of people with specialized skill sets to achieve the targets set.
Further, these days SEO efforts are heavily affected by social signals. Social signals include retweets, Facebook likes and shares, reposts and other social networking site actions. Sending out the right image while online is often a full time task in itself. Businesses cannot afford to ignore this aspect as both positive and negative attention impact SEO efforts significantly. The prevalence of buttons on every site that lets you ‘Like’, ‘Share’, ‘Tweet’, ‘StumbleUpon’ or +1 the content lets search engines know what an actual human thinks about the content rather than taking only the opinion of a bot/crawler.
A few years back, search engine rankings did not take location into consideration. The first result for a keyword search would remain the same irrespective of the location the search originated from. Today, all search providers have in effect walled off the search results to pertain to a particular country by introducing country specific domains. Further, users who have location tracking services enabled get results that are localized and tailored to their needs. In this scenario, SEO efforts become a balancing act. Internet marketers need to optimize the websites after getting a clear understanding of the business local and international reach. This will have an impact on the relevant traffic the website receives. There are definitely more things on an Internet marketer’s plate to care of today but the SEO still constitute a lion share of his efforts.
Article written by Andrea Walters, a freelance writer for www.globalx.net – The Nation’s Lowest All-Digital Price Provider. Click here for more info about Globalx.
References:
1. The State of SEO and Internet Marketing in 2012 – Aug 20, 2012
http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-state-of-seo-and-internet-marketing-in-2012
2. Banner blindness – Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
Optimizing your site is something you should be constantly working on. Read this article to find out how to keep your SEO campaign up-to-date.
Some of your keywords might not remain popular. That’s the tough truth. As your online business grows, people will become more familiar with your products and perhaps use more specific keywords. Your brand could even become a strong keyword if you are able to develop a good branding strategy. Keep checking search volumes on Google Ad Words and other similar tools and use a good analytical plug-in to find out how people found your site. You should also monitor how your website ranks on different search engines for specific keywords to make sure your SEO campaign is efficient. There are quite a few websites with great rankings tools or options, like Raven Tools or toolbox at SEOmoz. Both of these tools are pretty pricy but definitely worth evey penny when it comes to tracking your SEO campaign.
Keep your site well organized as you add more content. You should create an archive for your old articles and organize them by themes instead of in a chronological manner. Avoid changing the URLs of your pages in case there are backlinks that are still active and popular. If certain links are still bringing a lot of traffic to pages that are no longer relevant to your campaign, you should make a few changes to these pages. Add links to newer pages or use a 301 redirections to take this traffic to a new page.
Your old backlinks could still be useful, even if they are no longer attracting any traffic. Create a new level of back-links to direct traffic to the pages where there are prominent links to your content. For instance, if you posted a lot of links to your content on message boards, you should look for similar discussions on different message boards and post a link to the old discussion where you answered with a link to your content. If bloggers or webmasters have written articles containing links to your content, you should help them get this content featured in online magazines or on popular sites.
Stay up-to-date with the sites and blogs your target audience visits. You need to get links from the most popular sites and perhaps join new social networks. Consumer surveys are a good way to stay current with trends, but you could also join message boards or keep track of what your customers share on social networks. Look for ways to integrate new trends into your campaign and do not hesitate to try new things. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing and expect them to copy you if you find a successful technique. Select your keywords smartly and get back-links on new popular sites before they do. If you find that the competition for a certain keyword is too strong, focus on another aspect of your campaign to get ahead of your competitors by reaching out to a niche they are not aware of yet.
Apply these tips and take the time to do some lite research on a regular basis. Do not hesitate to try new SEO techniques and reach out to new niches: this is how you will keep your online business going.
Since the invention of all the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and some others, the effectiveness and usefulness of search engine optimization has always been over-emphasized. But most people who are new in the website designing field wonder whether or not it is really something that must be concerned in order to achieve something big. Every webmaster’s dream is to rank their websites higher in search engines so that the highest number of people can visit their site and sign up with them. SEO certainly helps and any website that employs it will certainly stand out in the crowd. You must keep on developing your knowledge on SEO so that you can boost the search engine rank of your website and also your profitability.
On-page SEO tactics that can guarantee a big difference to your website rank
Though we all know this but on-page SEO is the only thing that we can control ourselves and these are some of the factors that you can do without having to rely on the other external factors. Have a look at some of them.
- Use killer content: It takes just a few minutes to set up a new website and fill it up with content that is stolen from other websites and using all the other bad stuff. This may fulfill your dream of creating a website but will not ultimately help you in the long run as there will be very few visitors to your website. Always remember that the timeless pillar of your website is always your content and this is the reason why you need to provide killer content to your website. Hire a content writer who specializes in writing unique content for websites. Keep it fresh as this is the key to a higher rank.
- Perfect usage of keywords: When it comes to making the most of SEO, you must remember that you write for search engines. Though this is the truth but you must always make sure that you write first for your readers and then for grabbing a better search engine ranking. There are some particular ways in which you should use your keywords. Try using the keyword in the title of the article, in the other title tags, within the first 50-100 words of the article and also within the images used in the website. Don’t forget to make a proper research of the keywords before using them.
- A catchy title: The content and the keywords are on one side and the title is on an entirely different side as it is too important for grabbing a good search engine ranking. Use catchy titles, headlines that grab the attention of the visitors and make it as unique as possible. Try to use the keyword in the title too as the visitors will sooner be directed to your website in this way.
- Appropriate links: If you link to other websites, this will not only show your appreciation for others but also will enhance the form of sharing what others say. The positive effects of using links always outweigh the negative ones. However, make sure that the outbound links are to trusted resources and not to “bad neighborhood”.
Therefore, if you’re interested in securing a higher search engine rank, ensure that you’ve used the above mentioned SEO techniques. Boost your profitability and your returns.
- This is the guest post from Jack Hudson from StudentLoansCompany.info
Featured image by nevermoresearch.com
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