Keith Baxter Interviews Me About SEO
January 21, 2008
Keith Baxter did an interview with me last week on search engine optimization. In the interview Keith grills me about Google, site structure, links, social bookmarking, and other related SEO topics. Toward the end I make a special announcement that you'll want to get in on as well…
You can listen to it below by clicking the Play button. It's about 50 minutes long. Please leave your thoughts and comments about the interview (and the new look of my blog!) below.
Short on time, or want to burn this MP3 to a CD and listen in the car, or on your iPod or whatever? Right-click here and select Save from the menu to save the MP3 file directly to your hard drive.
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Boosting Rankings through Social Bookmarking
January 15, 2008
If you're not submitting your blog posts, articles and web pages to social bookmarking sites, you're missing out on a lot of link-love that Google looks fondly upon.
You see, my Search Engine Myths Exposed report makes it clear that you don't have to get links from related sites to rank (known in the SEO world as "themed links"). As long as the links come from quality pages, Google will happily count them toward your ranking.
Social Bookmarking sites currently have a lot of value in Google's eyes. Google seems to love sites that rely on democracy to decide what deserves the highest rank (thus their own link-based algorithm). By submitting your pages to these sites, the links will often get crawled and applied to your ranking very quickly — often within a few days.
I've been giving my pages an extra boost by submitting to a few dozen bookmarking sites myself, and I've seen rank increases to the tune of 3 to 5 ranking points on Google's first page of results for my chosen keywords.
I can't share the keywords with you because the sites are in the 3WayLinks.net network, and it's against the terms to share that information. Suffice it to say that the keywords are competitive enough to provide hundreds of visitors per day with my current rankings. That's one of the things I love about 3WayLinks.net — it provides a solid link base on which to build your rankings for tougher keywords.
A couple of great tools to use when submitting to SBMs are SocialMarker.com and OnlyWire.com. SocialMarker.com makes the process of submitting your sites semi-automated, whereas OnlyWire.com fully automates the submission. Both are good tools that are worth looking into (and both are free).
When submitting your pages to social bookmarking sites, set your title tag to the keywords that you want to rank for to get the most value from Google for your links. If you're interested in generating traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves, you'll want to modify your titles to be appealing to viewers as well.
For instance, if you want to rank for the phrase "old time radio", just set your title to "old time radio." But if you want to draw visitors, "Old time radio - Thousands of free MP3 shows!" would work much better. Keep in mind, though, that you sacrifice some link value when the link to your site is not your exact keywords.
If your site is brand new, vary your titles so that the links pointing to your site do not all contain the same keywords. If your site is already established with lots of links, a few dozen links with the same link text is not going to be a problem, and it's safe to just use your main keywords as the titles.
If you're hoping to draw visitors from social bookmarking sites to an AdSense revenue site, keep in mind that visitors at bookmarking sites are notorious for never clicking on your ads. If your only form of revenue on the site is AdSense, you might want to word your titles for maximum SEO value and forgo the visitors directly from the sites.
Let me close with another good social bookmarking experience. A friend of mine setup a site that he wanted to rank for a "low hanging fruit" set of keywords (razor targeted for great conversion rates, but without getting hundreds of visitors a day). He asked for my advice, and I offered to submit his site to the social bookmarking sites for him.
He agreed, and I did so. At the time of the submission his site was stuck on page 3 of Google's results. A few days later he freaked out because his site disappeared from the rankings (this is typical when a new site gets a bunch of links quickly–your site will often disappear while Google recalculates your ranking). But about a week after that his site jumped onto page 2 of Google. Not long after that he was on page one. Now he's one happy camper, and it was thanks to social bookmarking links!
So when you're out looking for places to get links from, don't forget about social bookmarking sites. They won't perform miracles with your rankings, but they certainly give a solid boost.
I'd love to know what you think! Please leave your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
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Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
The SEO Benefits Of An Affiliate Program
January 11, 2008
Don't look so shocked! It's true, affiliate programs can have great search engine optimization benefits.
Now, I know that affiliate programs are often seen as a way to get around needing to do any search engine optimization. I'll be honest with you: for a long time that's how I saw them. "If I have an affiliate program," I thought, "then I don't have to worry about getting ranked in the search engines. All of my traffic will come from the affiliate referrals!"
There is some truth to that. Having an affiliate program for a product that converts well does ensure a steady flow of traffic even if you're not well ranked in the search engines. But if you play your cards right, your affiliate program can do double duty: send a steady stream of referrals from the affiliates and get you ranked for some solid keywords in Google.
Let me explain how this is possible.
How Affiliate Links Help Rank Your Product Page
Most affiliate links use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is the technical term for a permanent redirect. Basically, a 301 redirect tells the search engine crawlers to count the affiliate link as a link to the final destination rather than the initial link.
For example, your affiliate link might look like this:
http://theproductdomain.com/?id=12345
But it contains a 301 redirect to the home page:
http://theproductdomain.com/
So when Google sees the affiliate link, it's not going to try and rank theproductdomain.com/?id=12345, but will apply the link to the ranking of the final destination instead (in this case the home page).
This also applies when affiliates use 301 redirecting scripts to "cloak" their affiliate links. A large portion of affiliates do this. Instead of using the affiliate link above, they will use a redirect that might look like this:
http://affiliatedomain.com/recommends/yourproduct.php
That script will usually use a 301 redirect to their affiliate link, which then 301 redirects to your site's home page. Google follows both 301s and applies the initial link to the ranking of the final destination (your product sales page). This is also true if the affiliate uses links from cloaking sites like TinyUrl.com or OffTo.net.
To get the maximum benefit from this, you need to make sure that your affiliate program links always redirect to the main product page. For example, a ClickBank affiliate link will result in referrals landing at a page like this:
http://theproductdomain.com/?hop=cbusername
That's not what you want! You want them to land at theproductdomain.com without showing the "hop=cbusername" portion, because Google counts those as two different pages. So you should make sure that the product page will check the url to see if the "hop=cbusername" is there, and if it is, perform a 301 redirect to theproductdomain.com. This will ensure that you get the maximum benefit from the affiliate links aimed at your product site.
If your site uses PHP, you can use an index.php file that looks something like this:
if(isset($_GET["hop"])){
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://theproductdomain.com/");
header("Expires: 0");
exit;
}
else{
readfile("salesletter.html");
exit;
}
?>
Thanks to whitehatcrew.com for the 301 header addition. Can't believe I forgot that!
What this will do is check for the "hop" variable in the query string. If it finds it, it will redirect to the home page instead. If not, it will show salesletter.html (which should contain your product's sales letter). That's an easy way to make sure that ClickBank affiliate links all end up in a 301 redirect to the home page. Don't worry, the ClickBank cookies will all remain in place so that the affiliate gets credit.
A side benefit is that this will make your affiliates happy. In the past I've had many affiliates write in and ask me to remove the "hop=" for my ClickBank products. They don't like to see it there.
Encourage Proper Keyword Usage In The Affiliate Links
As you may already be aware, having the keywords that you want to rank for in the links aimed at your site is incredibly important to rank well for those keywords. So, for example, if you want your product page to rank for "green widgets", it's not going to help you much if all of the affiliate links say "Go to theproductdomain.com now!" or something like that which is completely unrelated to "green widgets."
To encourage the use of "green widgets" in the link anchor text, be sure and provide the HTML code for your affiliates on the affiliate page. A large portion of your affiliates, especially the ones newer to affiliate marketing, will just copy and paste whatever you give them to use right into their web pages and blogs.
To illustrate this, do a search in Google for "search engine myths exposed" "holy grail". As of right now that will return 584 results.
The majority of those results are from people who just copied and pasted the example sales copy that I gave my affiliates to promote my new report, Search Engine Myths Exposed. In this particular instance I did not take my own advice and include the HTML code with the keywords that I wanted to rank for in the example copy (it was really meant for emailing, not posting to a web page). However, it clearly demonstrates that a large number of affiliates will copy and paste whatever you give them to use!
Fortunately for me, many of my affiliates are linking to the report site with the keywords "Search Engine Myths Exposed." This has ensured my #1 position for the phrase in Google.
At first my report did not rank #1 for those keywords. Some of my affiliates were ahead of me, and I was down around #8 in the results. But after I announced the pre-launch and got a swarm of affiliates, my site quickly jumped into first place at Google.
Don't Limit Yourself To Your Product Name
You certainly don't want to limit yourself to rank for the name of your product. Research targeted keywords that will help generate sales. For example, my Instant Article Wizard software currently ranks in the top 10 for the keywords article marketing, which brings in steady traffic and sales direct from Google.
In Summary
Yes, your affiliate program will bring in a steady flow of referrals and sales even if you don't rank well in the search engines, but with a little forethought and extra effort, it can also get you ranked for keywords that will bring generate sales and increase your bottom line!
Please post your thoughts and comments below.
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Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. He is the creator of a suite of popular software tools, including: Jonathan L Leger 
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