So you’ve scoured this site for every tiny bit of advice out there to help you boost your site’s page ranking. You’ve sifted through all the SEO tips and techniques, you’ve set up a perfect PPC campaign and are adding new content daily and have spent hours and hours getting some relevant links. And yet your site is stuck in the back end of Google (or is nowhere to be seen) and is not showing any signs of moving. You could be tempted, as many new affiliates are, to ease off on all SEO activities, cancel your PPC campaigns and in some cases give up completely.

Stop!

This slow start is perfectly normal and you could be throwing away a thriving business of the future by not keeping the faith.

Time for a reality check. Perhaps we should be blaming Bill Gates with his notion of “business at the speed of thought” for creating the illusion that online businesses can open and flourish in a matter of moments. Let’s be honest: you wouldn’t expect to just open a brand new shop on the high street and to be reaching the level of turnover not expected until year 3 in the first six months. You need to wait for customers to realise you’re there, you need to gain their trust and you need to keep offering new and exciting reasons for them to shop with you, as opposed your competitors. This is EXACTLY the same with online business. In fact, because of SEO your online business has the potential to see the kind of business a high street shop can only dream about FAR SOONER, but not immediately.

Search engines are extremely fussy and temperamental mistresses, as I’m sure you’re already aware. If you do something right they reward you but if you do something wrong they punish you so you really have to make sure you’re playing their game. Worse than that, some of the current search engine algorithms grant new sites a “honeymoon period” in which they may see rankings rise – perhaps impressively so – only to tail off after 3-4 months. An illusion of rapid growth followed by a long period of growing despair.

Rather than checking AdSense and your affiliate accounts for the latest 0.0002p increase in in earnings, there are a number of very positive things you can do during this tough period.

First and foremost, ask yourself some hard questions. What differentiates you? Why SHOULD the search engines give you space. Are you yet another price comparison, affiliate mobile phone, broadband, credit card or bingo site with little or nothing to distinguish you from the zillions of others already out there — some more established than you and all chasing the same traffic and the same keywords? Google can’t see pretty pictures or graphics on the site and it certainly doesn’t know or care that you are the nicest person in Britain and have worked more hours than the rest of your family put together. Can you answer these questions? Really? If not, de-risk your strategy. Apply everything you have already learned to a sector that may not offer such exciting commissions but for which the competition is less insane and for which earnings per thousand clicks are still reasonable.

As you will have seen from the biographies of some of the UK’s most successful business people, the ability to adapt and to recognise when something isn’t working are among the many keys to success. And all of them have failed at least once, in most cases many times.

Assuming that you have concluded that your strategy IS sensible, the best thing you can do is start monitoring your progress, because you’re bound to be making some if you’re putting the time and effort into SEO and the like. Think about using analytics providers such as Omniture as well as using SEO Quake-style toolbars to measure page ranks, indexes, keyword density etc. Using the site ‘Who is’ is a great place to start too because it will tell you your SEO percentage for your site’s META data. A lot of sites put a lot of effort into the SEO on individual pages but not on the site as a whole. NME.COM, one of the most successful music news sites on the web, was recently re-launched purely with SEO in mind and they hit over 3.5 million page views in November 2008. Granted they’ve been going for over 15 years but it took the re-launch to see the kind of progress they’ve been waiting for. That’s not to say a complete re-launch is necessary. Chances are you did your research before you set the site up but it can’t do any harm to just check it out.

Start by writing down all your SEO data for your site on a specific date. Do it again on the same date the following month. Then the following three months and so on. There are so many elements and aspects that you can measure and so many ways in which you will notice progress, even if sales and page views aren’t rising the way you want. And seeing keywords that you’ve optimised moving up the keyword list will show you that your efforts are indeed paying off.

Whilst you are busily tracking progress, don’t forget to continue with ongoing SEO activities. If you don’t feel that you have necessarily followed best practice with the SEO for the site itself, keep researching and make sure you have all the main factors properly under control. However, don’t keep constantly fiddling with the site – constant change can potentially be counter-productive and in extreme cases it can create an over-optimisation penalty.

Most importantly, keep adding fresh content, especially once you are out of the honeymoon period – this is when so many webmasters give up and their sites die. You CANNOT add too much content too quickly. Keep building link relationships with other sites (see our other articles on link building here at Lammo.net for key points). The search engines are sensitive to the history and the ongoing performance of a site. Constant addition of content and new links signals to the search engines that you are a serious, valuable resource in your space.

The point is that building your site is going to take patience, time, a bit of trial and error and a lot of faith. If you’ve done your research and you’re not trying to cut SEO corners then all your hard work will pay off, and when it does you will notice how much of a difference it really makes and will continue to make.

The very fact that you have bothered to find and to read this post all the way through indicates that you almost certainly have the tenacity to cut it as an affiliate!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

You might also like to read...