Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of constructing a website that is technically suitable for indexing by search engines - Google, Yahoo, etc. in a way which maximises its rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target search terms or keywords — thus driving traffic to the site. Search engine technology continues to advance, but the fact remains that search engine “crawlers” or “spiders” - software programs, such as “Googlebot”, or “Yahoo Slurp”, which follow certain links on the Web, harvesting and indexing the information they find - don’t necessarily possess quite the level of intelligence that many attribute to them! They are largely text driven, and therefore more concerned with the textual content of a website rather than more fanciful design elements, animation and sound. Something else to bear in mind, of course, is that, with over of 20 billion individual pages on the Web, it may be weeks, or months, before a search engine crawler visits a website and acknowledges any additions or changes. The success of most natural search campaigns should be measured over many months rather than weeks.

Much of the following also matters even if you are planning to market the site entirely using pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns but we will focus here specifically on achieving good rankings in the natural search results. There are essentially 3 primary elements to any SEO strategy, ALL of which need to be in place:-

1. On-Page Code Optimisation
Many people when referring to “SEO” are actually referring purely to on-page optimisation. Whilst you clearly want to create a site that is aesthetically pleasing and coherent for human visitors, from a purely search engine perspective it is the underlying code together with the content that matters here. Entire books have been written about on-page optimisation and many specialist web design and SEO firms exist purely to service this requirement.

In essence, you need to ensure that the basics are in place for each page on the site, all optimised for a target search term or keyword relevant to the page in question. These include the relevant hypertext mark-up language (HTML) TITLE tag, H1, H2 (heading) tags, and the use of ALT text (alternative text) associated with any images on the page.

Surprisingly, the title tag is often overlooked. Contained in its own HTML tag in the header section of the page, the title should be a succinct phrase, or slogan, typically between 5 and 8 words in length, which describes a web page. It appears in the window title bar at the very top of the browser. As such, it should reflect the content of a page, but also communicate, clearly and specifically, the value of that page content to a visitor. Many websites use the same title - which may be mission statement or a generic company description - for all pages, but a unique, keyword rich title for each page can attract more traffic to a site and boost affiliate sales. An effective title does, of course, require some thought; it should include the major keywords that you are targeting on your home and other pages in a concise and “punchy” way.

META description and keyword tags should also be properly included. Although it is widely held that Google no longer uses the keywords tag, many believe that it can be a negative if missing or if incorrectly used. The META tags are not visible to human readers unless they view the source code for the page within their browser, but are vital for the search engines.

The contents of the H1 / H2 tags appear on the page and merit detailed attention. These headings and sub headings, too, can not only make the content of a web page easier to read for a human visitor - introducing the content, and indicating changes in direction, or topic - but, if correctly structured and formatted, can make the content more visible to search engine spiders. Effective headings and sub headings typically include one, or more, primary keywords and are presented using “H1″, “H2″ and “H3″ HTML tags, which indicate their respective importance to search engine spiders.

The precise balance of keywords, the degree of repetition and the use of other relevant text in each of these HTML tags is a science in its own right and beyond the scope of this article. A quick search for ‘on-page optimisation’ should yield a number of good quality advisory resources with relevant suggestions and worked examples. It is also essential that your internal linking (links between pages within your site) is correctly structured. We will examine this in the section on linking below. Of equal importance is the content in the main body of the page which we will examine in a moment.

Other vital on-page elements include the effective use of cascading style sheets (CSS) to define as much of the layout and content as possible. In fact it is now possible to use CSS divisional layers to create much of the site, providing the dual benefit of an ultra quick, search engine friendly code structure without compromising the layout or visuals of the site. Adherence to the current HTML standards, such as those managed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is also held to be important in that they allow the search engines to more rapidly and efficiently read the site’s code. W3C provides a validator which allows you to check the compliance of your final code. You should also ensure that you have a valid robots.txt file set up on your web server.

There are also a number of don’ts which include using ANY spammy techniques such as cloaking, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, invisible text and so forth. Whilst many sites still appear at the top of the search engines with these techniques visibly in place, they are unlikely to remain there forever.

As a footnote for those of you using Wordpress, ensure that you have the latest plug-ins, one of which is specifically designed to offset a duplicate content issue inherent in the Wordpress structure. The same applies to any other site publishing tools. Many of them are reasonably well designed for SEO but require the latest versions and upgrades.

2. Content
Content is king — and will remain so. Rich, unique content is particularly important for affiliates as we have discussed elsewhere on lammo.net. The fresher your content, the more regularly the search engines are likely to index your site. If you are going to invest time or money anywhere, focus on content! There are a number of SEO-specifics when creating content for your web pages. Firstly and, perhaps obviously, the content and the keywords must match up and reinforce each other. If your page’s HTML tags tell the search engines that the page is about ‘Oak Furniture’, make sure that the content IS about Oak furniture! Secondly, ensure that the content occurs as high as possible on the page and minimise the code or script that the search engines have to wade through before they can get to the ‘meat’.

Always ensure that your content is genuinely unique. Never plagiarise. Never repeat, copy / paste.

Ever.

If you have any doubts as to the uniqueness of a given piece of content, try using Copyscape which, for a modest sum, cross-indexes Google’s search results and looks for occurrences of similar text, right the way down to individual phrases within the text. Whilst some coincidence will occur naturally, large chunks of matching text will do you no favours at all.

There are a number of further techniques that can help elevate the value of your content. Always ensure that you have a sensible keyword density for your target term (remember term selection is a science in its own right which we cover elsewhere on lammo.net). By keyword density we mean the term as a percentage of overall content so, for example, “Oak Furniture” occurring twice’ in 100 words gives a keyword density of 4 words out of 100 which is 4%. Opinions vary wildly as to the ‘right’ keyword density. 2-4% is not a bad guideline. Above 4% and you will start to struggle to maintain readability. Go mad and you may even suffer an ‘over optimisation penalty’ from the search engines - yes they do exist! Your target term should occur at least once within bold or strong HTML tags in the content, ideally towards the top. Finally, ensure that you make use of imaging or rich media content such as videos whenever you can and that, as above, the ALT text for these items is set to support your target keywords.

3. Linking
Linking is another science in its own right and constitutes a major portion of the criteria by which search engines assess and rank a given site. It can be broken down into internal and external linking.

Internal linking - relates to the links between your own pages on the site itself. Most sites have some kind of navigation bar but is it search engine friendly? So many of these are produced using script or graphics which the search engines may struggle to use. It is now possible to create them using search engine friendly techniques, many of which involve the clever use of cascading style sheets (CSS) and can yield attractive ‘hover’ type menus that actually consist of completely ‘normal’ search engine friendly HTML links. With any link, internal or external, make sure that the anchor text of the link is relevant to the page to which it points. The way in which the search engines evaluate the importance of internal links is complex and should also reinforce the keywords you are targeting for a specific page.

External linking — attracting and exchanging links with other relevant websites — is still more complex. In fact so much so that we have made it a completely separate topic here at lammo.net. Second only to unique content, an effective linking campaign is VITAL to the success of any SEO exercise. Without links, the search engines cannot find new sites and will struggle to assess the importance of existing sites for a given topic or search term.

Other Elements of SEO Strategies
Finally, a few more do-s and don’t-s. DON’T bother submitting your site to the search engines using the ‘add url’ type facilities or a third party service provider. If anything, this is counter-productive and may slow down indexing of your site. Far better to be found ‘naturally’ via links. Similarly, DON’T create a Google site map, particularly if yours is an existing site. These have been known to cause pages to be dropped and the rankings of other pages to shift incorrectly.

DO maintain an up-to-date standard site map which will assist the search engines in identifying your pages. DO consider submission to top ranking directories (there are only a small number of these in the UK - most directories are weak and / or counter-productive). DO consider entry into DMOZ, or the “Open Directory Project”, as it is sometimes known. This is the largest directory on the Internet, with over 3 million websites, and powers the core directory services of Google and many other popular search engines and portals. The Open Directory is edited by human beings and most entries are organised in an intelligent, and relevant, fashion. In order to submit a website for inclusion in DMOZ, you first need to choose a category - based on the keywords that you are targeting - and a catchy, human readable description for your website. Whilst DMOZ is notoriously tough on pure-play affiliate sites, if you can demonstrate sufficient unique content and value-add, you stand a chance of getting listed. It may take more than one attempt.

Clearly SEO is a vast topic and we have really just scratched the surface here with what, we hope is a useful introduction. We will be providing further more in-depth pieces on certain elements here at lammo.net over the coming weeks and months.

Further SEO Link Building Information

Web Design Optimisation - Growing network of PSP tubes, video tutorials on web design, graphic design, PSP X2, Dreamweaver, and much more….  
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SEO Software Tools - Tendmx specialises in SEO software tools and services that helps increase page ranks on Google, MSN and Yahoo…  
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SEO Specialist - Information blog on free search engine optimisation advice. Offers effective tips on top ranking at Google, Yahoo and msn search. Trade secrets through email. Tips include: new backlinks, updating and creating useful content….  
bloglines.com

Free Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing Tools - Completely free Search Engine Optimization tools and techniques to get listed in Google, Yahoo, MSN in less than 48 hours….  
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Internet Marketing India - Brainpulse is an Internet Marketing services provider that specialises in Search Engine Marketing. The company undertakes a complete analysis of your core business objectives and internet marketing goals before planning SEO activities…  
brainpulse.com

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