Affiliate advertising is effective if you are connected with the right affiliates and they are generating the type of traffic you need. Having affiliates can boost your traffic in several ways, from link exchanging and referrals to link building and SEO. Affiliate marketing is the way to have one website drive traffic to another. You will find large businesses will affiliate with people that offer similar products or services but not those directly in competition with their products and services.
Posted in 
Content Development
August 3rd, 2009 
josh In this article we will explain the value of quality unique content and SEO. Originally the internet was designed as a free information stream, however over the past decade business’s and marketers have seen the value in generating traffic by supplying information as a product and turned the world wide web into a income producing giant. For example writing an article will generate traffic. Traffic will then sell your products and selling product equals $$$. This system has created a mass manipulation of web content in order to achieve high rankings.
Example: Overloading Keywords
When a person queries a search in a search engine, the spider’s job is to supply the searcher with the highest quality result related to the specific keyword(s). One of the elements a spider looks for is keyword density which basically is how many times does the keyword appear in the websites content. Lets say you are searching for “baseball cards” in the image below you will see a cached wikipedia page highlighting the variations of the words baseball and cards.
One of the reasons this wiki page is on the first page of Google because of its large amount of content related to baseball. Wiki is an online encyclopedia, they are based on information and in turn they have massive amounts of traffic due to content because of their natural keyword density. Basically the more pages about baseball a site has the more times it appears naturally within the content and the density is higher. The key is to be natural, and to produce original content. In the past when search engine spiders were in the infancy, people would try to trick the spiders by writing a 500-word article and overloading it with keywords. (Example: check out our selection of baseball cards and baseballs for baseball fans.”) This ‘keyword spamming’ did work and sometimes still slips past the radar of spiders. However, as spiders are getting smarter and can recognize the overloading of keywords this occurs much less. The end result of spamming is inevitable loss (sometimes permanent) of your rankings, so our advice is to write for the reader not for the spider. Three pages of natural content will push your keyword density up, and the beauty is you will have more pages cached in the engines and more possibilities to rank for, so this is truly a ‘if you write it they will come’ web world we are in.
This article is regarding duplicate content and the impact it has on rankings in search engines. The popular trend of duplicate template sites had a major impact on web template companies in 2002. We like to call it the crash of the canned templates. There were several industries being dominated by the template approach. Lets use real estate as an example. At the time the majority of websites being produced for that industry were templates, selected primarily for their quick setup and low cos. Every Realtor needed a website and for 200 dollars you were all set with a template. Within a few clicks you could upload the design that you selected out of the 20 available and you could slap your photo, name and email in and you were ready to do business. It all seemed so perfect, you even had 30 pages of information about real estate, buyers guides, sellers guides, everything! It made Realtors seem professional and knowledgeable.
This was great for some time until thousands were sold, all with the same content! Suddenly Realtors were asking ‘how in the world am I going to be different?” As the search engines began to tighten the standards they used for selections, things went form bad to worse. You would see one happy realtor being found on page one and another realtor bummed out and confused because they had the same template but were not to be found for the same keywords. Why? Because they had purchased their template one week after the first realtor. Why were the spiders taking sides? The answer is very simple. For search engines the total data on the Internet is like an encyclopedia. If you flip through an encyclopedia looking for information on real estate your not going to see 30 pages of all the same info, so why would a search engine which was designed to be an digital encyclopedia do just that. If you cut corners in developing your site you will put your site at risk. Always originate your own content; if you steal it from another site then you will be penalized because the other site had the info published first. We can’t express how important unique content is and how powerful your site can be if you just write quality information. Always be natural with your content, work hard, blog weekly, and you will see traffic and rankings.
Ethical Linking
August 3rd, 2009 josh There is an ethic to creating a search engine friendly site. It is best understood from the search engines perspective. What is the search engines primary concern? The primary concern for the engine is to return the most relevant information to the users query. To do so, the engine is concerned with a few key factors: Google’s mission statement is, ’to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
In order to accomplish this Google, and other leading search engines such as MSN and Yahoo, have developed algorithms that help determine three important criteria about every site.
• Can they determine what the page or site is about? Is it consistent with the title of the site?
• Does the site offer quality information? Is it presented with appropriate organization and semantics?
• Does the site offer unique information or is it trying to sell a product?
How do these spiders determine the content and quality of your site? Here is a hot list of the top elements.
Title tags must represent the content of the page. The title tag is the first indication a spider receives to decide what the content of the page is going to be. This is going to be the broadest representation of the content. Using a book as an example, the title tags would be the equivalent to the name of the book. The title tag has been and probably will always be one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. In fact, fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings.
• Your code matters to search engines. It needs to be clean, semantically correct, and unique. Use wikipedia as an example: minimal design features, no flash, custom CMS and loads of [quality] content. When the spiders scan a page to index they do not understand heavy code such as flash and cold fusion, thus making the site less likely to be indexed by the spiders. A clean code such as PHP allows the spiders to get through the code quickly and move onto the content.
Header tags are HTML tags that help outline a web page or draw attention to important information. Keywords located inside header tags can provide a rankings boost in the search engines. Keywords in header tags are much like the headlines on a newspaper. Header tags are similar to your title tag in that it must represent the content of the page. Using Header tags correctly tells the search engine what words are important in the context of your page.
The Sitemaps Protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. By submitting Sitemaps to a search engine a webmaster is only helping that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site(s). Using this protocol does not guarantee that your webpages will be included in search indexes nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked by a search engine.
Linking, from an SEO perspective, is essentially having users tell other users that “this is worth reading”. Google’ takes into account the popularity of content based on how many people/ sites are linking to it. There are several categories of linking that are important [and deadly if executed poorly] to the search engine friendliness of a site.
Inbound one-way back links are when someone from another site links to your site form their site or blog.
Outbound links are when you link to another site from yours.
Internal links are the links on a page of your site that link to another page on the site.
- Dynamic links are from dynamically generated sites like blogs or forums.
Static links are from a static HTML page.
Link Farms
August 3rd, 2009 josh Link farms are web pages that are designed just to exchange links. An example when link builders develop a one page website with minimal content and use it just to give outbound links. This is a form of link farm. Once again spammers were able to trick the Google algorithm into validating one-way links through these networking sites. In a reaction to the link farm techniques in the market place Google engineers had to come up with the next twist in their notorious algorithm. In order to validate links even further they looked at the quality of the information and depth of the web pages in which links were coming from. Once reviewing the structure and information they determined a page rank system. Websites would now have a value placed, based on them based on uniqueness of content and the quality of inbound links. Websites could have a page rank of 0-10 with Google. In order to determine your sites page rank download the google tool bar and when you pull up a website it will give you that sites PR rating. Once Google established its page rank system the engineers decided to validate PR 4 or higher inbound links. Link farms instantly became useless and not only did it ruin a lot of spammers’ rankings, but some were black listed (banned from Google).
Google’s twist on outbound links:
Things were beginning to clean up with the Google results, high quality sites were starting to get major rankings with just a few good links and unique content. In an ongoing effort to refine their results Google added a few new twists to their algorithm by validating outbound links. The value of an outbound link is important to Google, however it can be harmful if your not careful. When linking to another website you are sending a search engine spider to a site that you see value in, in relationship to your site. At least this is how a spider thinks. For example you could have a link to a local cafe website because you love the food, however be careful because the quality of the website in which you link to reflects on your rankings. When linking to a site you are essentially vouching for its quality, and in the spiders eyes if the site does not meet quality standards then you could be guilty by association, which could be harmful to your rankings. Authority sites are a good way to get quality outbound links. For instance if you link to wikipedia it’s rating is a pr 7 or higher, in Google’s eyes this site is considered an authority site and by referencing them you are recommending quality. With that being said if you can get an inbound link from an authority site than you are winning the battle. Authority inbound links are the holy grail of links. When linking you should always be sure to keep track of your inbound and outbound links. Make sure you don’t have 20 links going out and only 3 coming in. A website is like your personal generator and when your site is new you only have limited power. A newer website with a pr 4 is like a small engine compared to a site like wiki which could be a nuclear power plant. The basic concept of inbound and outbound links is quality not quantity.
RSS Feeds
August 1st, 2009 josh RSS (which, in its most recent format, stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.
RSS content can be read using software called a “feed reader” or an “aggregator.” The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.
The initials “RSS” are used to refer to the following formats:
Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose markup language.[1] It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own tags. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems, particularly via the Internet.[2] It is used both to encode documents and serialize data. In the latter context, it is comparable with other text-based serialization languages such as JSON and YAML.[3] RSS + XML feeds can be used to send dynamicly generated content to users who will then recieve thier content via an “aggregator” which then links back to the source of the content. This gives that content multiple one way back links.
Really Simple Syndication or RSS feed is a type of coding that is dynamic in nature and allows parties to access and propagate content from one website or blog to another. An example of this would be yahoo news. If you go to yahoo.com you have an option of subscribing to multiple RSS feeds, whether it be news or sports updates, it is all provided in a format that is dynamic. If you choose to add this information to your website or blog you can paste in a piece of code and the information will begin to stream as it is updated by Yahoo. One of the most popular uses of RSS feeds is through blogs. A blog or web log is a dynamic content management system. What this means is the user is able to login in and generate a topic or thread. Once they have chosen their topic they may post comments within that topic. The comments are then published to the web. Blogs are very popular because once the information is posted it can be streamed into multiple places, like RSS News readers, example: (newsgator.com) or simply downloaded by reader’s google or yahoo homepage. A user might also paste the RSS feed into their websites source code. RSS and SEO
Now that you have the basics on how a RSS feed operates, how can you use this type of coding to boost your SEO. A popular way is to encourage others to download your blog. After you setup your blog on your website you want to start blogging about information related to your website. Example: If you are a real estate agent in San Diego, then you could blog about San Diego real estate market updates. After a few posts the next step is getting the info to the readers. A good way is to submit your RSS feed to Newsreaders and Blog search engines. These are places that people are looking for current information that is to their interest. Once you start submitting your website to these sources you will begin to get people downloading your feed. Once the third party pastes your feed onto their website the back links begin. These links are simply coming from your blog feeds post title and will link back to where the information is hosted i.e.: your blog. This boosts your SEO by increasing the link popularity to your blog, which is hosted on your websites URL. However the value of these types of links slowly lose weight in search engines, i.e., the first post is more valuable than the 2nd, 3rd or 4th post, simply by its order. Google placed a higher value on the initial relationship itself. So the key to RSS linking is blog good quality information and people will add it and you will get traffic and popularity.
Introduction to Link Popularity
July 30th, 2009 josh The concept of Link popularity was first brought to the web by a new search engine called Google. A couple of Harvard students wanted to design a new way of searching and indexing websites. Prior to Google, search engines were very simple. A search engine spider or ‘bot’ only had a few things to follow; one being meta tags and the other was keyword density. These spiders were only interested in one thing, a websites ‘on page SEO’. So for a company selling “web design” they would type in various key word scenarios related to web design and place them in their website’s meta tags and saturate their page content. At the time this seemed to work, but when the Google guys decided that they wanted to expand upon the current concept and created link popularity, those methods began to backfire. The new engine would be looking for more than just tags and keywords it would look for the relationship between websites through linking. This was simply one site using a hyper link linking to another. So that same web design company that was coming up in the other engines would be have to have some links to be a good result in google. This gave the consumer the ability to decide the results. Example: Lets say the web design company started getting links from their clients websites, the more sites the more links the more credibility in Google’s eyes. This created the new concept called Reciprocal Linking.
Web Directories
July 27th, 2009 josh A web directory is similar to the yellow pages offline. The goal is to archive business or services in a format that is easy to navigate and a resource for a consumer. A great example of this is the Yahoo directory. Linking from directories is one of the oldest methods of getting traffic and inbound links to your website. In order for a directory to help your site ranking you must know your dos and don’ts prior to submissions. First take some time and review the directory; is it quality, what’s the directories page rank? Look at some of the directories inbound links; are they from quality sites and how many are there? Also does the directory itself spider well and rank in search engines?
If you have read our articles on ethical linking than you will have an understanding on how to evaluate website. A directory is a website and should be evaluated the same way. For example if a directory doesn’t have sufficient content then it can appear to be a link farm to search engines. A strong directory consists of quality unique coding, and the listings should have unique descriptions. Some of the more powerful directories are niche or local directories. Like some of the web design directories out there, they have content describing the different kinds of design like, graphic, logo and print and they also contain designers who have submitted their business profile with good content. So as a helpful tool we have listed some recommended directories to start. For other directories, we say again, always remember to analyze before you submit.
www.botw.org
www.dmoz.org
www.dir.yahoo.com
www.anywho.com
Reciprocal Linking
July 23rd, 2009 josh There is much discussion about reciprocal linking and its effects on search engine ranking. In a recent Google update, reciprocal links were one of the targets of the search engine’s latest filter. Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges, in order to boost their site’s rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster places a link on his website that points to another webmasters website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted. This crossed the acceptable threshold of Google’s latest filter and caused a great many websites to drop off the Google map.
Once this new Google Search engine became more and more popular do to the quality of its results a frantic link race was born. Google started gaining market share instantly and the traffic skyrocketed with it. Webmasters began linking and linking to get their clients in Google. Various markets, such as the real estate marketing industry, were able to see the mass reciprocal link campaigns first hand. It was a simple mutually beneficial relationship; I link to you and you link to me and Google will love us both. While this worked well, it had a primary objective of self-promotion. Some real estate agents were having hundreds of inbound and out bound links. All they wanted was to increase their link popularity, but the problem was they were not getting links because of popularity they were getting links in exchange for links. A good old you scratch my back and I will scratch yours. Google caught onto this unethical self-promotion and cracked down with a new way to look at links. They started looking closer at the links and created a Google Link Validity process.
Search Engine Optimization
July 12th, 2009 josh Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. The search engines will not index every page. Distance of pages from the root directory or home page of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.
A web crawler (also known as a Web spider or Web robot) is a program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms (Kobayashi and Takeda, 2000). This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code.
Google Link Validity
July 3rd, 2009 josh Google became the best search engine not because of their simple clean homepage, but because of the quality of their results through link popularity. Non-validated linking however, was slowly eroding away this advantage. The Google engine was getting saturated with link builders also called spammers. They would go out and build as many links as possible just to trick the Google spiders into a false sense of popularity. Google engineers had to come up with a solution for this fraudulent linking so they began validating only industry related reciprocal links. Google didn’t stop there, they took it a step further, and they put a higher value on one-way inbound links. This is when someone links to a website because they truly think its popular not because they are getting a link back. So the adjustment in the algorithm was made and spammers were hit hard, websites fell hundreds of pages from the results. But the spammers weren’t down for good. They needed to adapt to this algorithm change. The next thing they would do is to find a way to get the one-way links and have control. The methods used were directories and link farms , considered by many to be a form of unethical linking.
