With the recent news from Google about a big change to their algorithm and the way the rank websites, how will this affect small niche sites and affiliates? Ultimately Google’s Goal is to provide the most relevant and resourceful websites to answer the search queries. They are penalising sites with little or no unique content and giving kudos to bigger websites that have much more value in unique quality content.  Fair doos. Lets just hope that a small niche site that compares blue widgets from blue widget merchants is not penalised as it does add value to the visitor. I’ts providing them what they searched for and more as saving them time shopping around. Sure these types of sites don’t have a lot of content or a big sites and updated regularly but they can be a good resource. Ultimately Google wants more from these sites but it will be interesting to see how this affects us Affiliates.

I think things like quality and amount of links to the site, the onsite seo and internal site structure and linking will still play a big part in ranking those websites, small or big. I think this change will simply eradicate those sites that are just duping content and throwing up tiny sites with no value.

When building you niche site, always think about the consumer, the visitor your demographic market and what value your site will be adding to them coming to your site. Think of Google wanting your site to be relevant to the search terms, the links to your site be organic and as natural as possible. Don’t go throwing hundreds of links a day just to try and force this. Market your website using social media and if you truly offer something unique then you will do well. IMHO!

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I was reading on the Affiliates4U forum last night about Affiliates getting banned by Google when using Adwords. Google give them too many reasons and they find themselves out of business as they were almost 100% reliant on PPC. Now until recently we have been almost 100% focused on SEO as its the way we learnt how to get traffic to our sites using Keyword domains and linking using correct Anchor keyword links. We’ve recently started looking into PPC on our bigger sites whilst we wait for our sites to climb in SERPS organically as these sites aren’t keyword domains so they are taking a lot longer to rank.

What it highlighted to me is how much we rely on Google. They could change both SEO and PPC tomorrow if they really wanted. I doubt they will change there model too much but they are always changing the benchmarks for SEO, that’s for sure.

It also highlighted to me, how much Google don’t like Affiliates, well maybe not all affiliates but at least the ones that aren’t really adding value to their search engine. Ultimately all Google want is to provide the best results to the visitor in as quick a time as possible. What they don’t want is to provide search results where the visitors have to go through loops to get to the end site which is providing the service/product/resource or whatever it is.

Will Google start to take into account your site bounce rate, or are they already doing this. We have noticed they already take your site speed into account. I think the golden rule is to not put all your eggs in one basket and to think of your website or websites as a business. In doing this you will want to make sure your website is adding value to the consumer even if it is an Affiliate site. An example could be a review site, a price comparison site or even voucher codes sites. They add value right

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Whilst researching competition websites SEO, I will use the seobook.com toolbar for firefox as well as a few other tools every day. They give you quite a few results from several sources which include Site Links, Directory Listing, Social Media Listings and Site Info such as Page Rank and Traffic Info, which has been very useful to see how much effort needs to go into a site or page SEO to get it to rank. Now obviously there is a lot more research and work involved such as the quality of those linking to your competitors sites and not just the quantity.

What I see a lot is Affiliates talking a lot about Page Rank and to be honest I still use it to gauge how well optimized a website is. But I take the Page Rank with a pinch of salt now. For example this site has a Page Rank 3 yet last time I checked isn’t in the top 1 million websites in Alexa ranking . Now I’m pretty sure I know why this is. We have hardly posted on our forum in the last few weeks/months, we certainly don’t post here every day or even every week just for the sake of it. We simply use this as a blog to follow our journey in Affiliate Marketing. It’s a document store of stuff we’ve learned along the way if you like! Another reason we don’t blog that often here is that we’re so much more involved in developing our sites that make us the money. I suspect that if we blogged several times a day on this site our traffic rank would improve, our Alexa rank would jump right up and so would our visitors as we’d be appearing more in SERPS. However this is not to say this theory would work, just my theory, but I would say that it would have to be good quality unique content that was attracting visitors/views.

So to summarize my theory, Your website will climb in SERPS providing its updated with regular unique content as much as possible. Try and also gain regular related links to build up some authority. Don’t worry too much about your Page Rank or Alexa Rank, just use them as a guide.

To use Kirsty and Phil’s program (Location, Location, Location), AM is CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT & LINKS, LINKS, LINK

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Not so long ago, Google had announced that website speed would be part of their ranking algorithm. We have recently been affected by this with one of our niche sites. We were in 2nd spot on the first page of Google for some time for our 1 keyword niche domain which gets approx 110,000 exact and 368,000 broad searches in April according to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I’m not sure if the exact search matters too much when its a single keyword domain! Anyway, we noticed that it had dropped from 2nd spot to nowhere to be seen just the other day so we immediately started looking into what could be wrong to have caused the site to drop. Now this can sometimes be a mission to find out as Google doesn’t exactly tell you whats wrong, you have to dig around. So first thing was to check Google Webmaster Tools to see if there was any errors with our website pages – no errors. Then I checked out the diagnostics section in the speed section, noticed that our sites pages were 100% slower than the majority of websites. Not Great!

This was caused because our site is using our own product database to display the data feeds from several merchants. Now because the site keyword is quite generic there is a massive amount of products to display. This was an older site which was using our old php files which didn’t have pagination so some pages had to wait longer than 1 minute to display all those product images. The solution which we are still working on is to go through all those custom php pages and modify our script to include pagination. This will enable each page to only show say 20 products per page and make the pages load much faster. Something we should have done a while ago.

Now the next challenge will be to convince google to put us back by notifying them that we’ve corrected the problem. Lets see how long it takes to get it back to where it should naturally be.

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We have followed the below guide and have had huge success in Search Engine Optimization. We hope this helps others rank well.

Introduction to Backlinks and Link Building

Backlinks and Link Building is a very important factor for ranking well in search engines. The search engines robots scan all indexed sites billions of times a day.

The algorithms compute how many links and the value of those links back to each site. Google will rank your site well if you have backlinks from quality and relevant sites back to your site. They will determine the authority of those sites and the link back to your site.

In simple terms, you will rank well if you have a lot of quality Web sites that link to your site for those keywords based on  anchor text links.

Anchor text links is the text you link the address to. So an example is when you see Click here, this is the text but it will be associated to a web address.

Check out the Competition

The first step to building links back to your website is to research the competition and how they are ranking well. Find your keywords that you want to target, see who are listed in the top 3 spots and then evaluate their backlinks using the seo tools below.

Because search engines value the quality of those incoming links, you should then go through the competitions links and try and partner with the same websites.

SEO Tools to Check the Competition

I’d recommend looking for an SEO tool that will check what backlinks the competition has. We have used SEO Spyglass from link-assistant.com. This software is a paid for software but well worth the money. Starting from around $99. You can also use the free version but it does have some limitations. Still the free version can be very useful in finding how many backlinks, the quality of those links via link popularity, anchor text keywords used, number in links, age of site and much more.

Another free tool is Yahoos Site Explorer. This is a very fast tool but is very basic, however it will give you a good idea if its going to be easy or difficult to rank well against your competition. For example if you enter a competitors website and run the search, you could potentially find that they have thousands of links back to their site. This could take a very long time to gain that amount of links unless you are paying for links.

Google does also have a tool, again very basic but it doesn’t seem as up to date as Yahoo. This is simply run by typing link: url of website in the search box.

Another great tool is the SEO for firefox by Aaron Wall from SEObook.com. This firefox plugin will allow you to see in your search results quite detailed information about each result which includes pagerank, age, incoming links and loads more.

Link Partners

Once you have analyzed the competition, you will be able to check out the potential link partners and evaluate the quality of those links. The age of the domain of the potential link partner is an important factor. Google will treat an older domain with a higher priority than a domain that has only been registered recently.

Try and acquire links from domains with .edu and .gov top level domain extensions. Search engines know that these education and government sites are much less likely to link to a low quality site. Also the web was started as a research and education resource so these sites will most likely have been around the longest.

Focus on links from pages that already rank well. If a page has a page rank of 0 or 1 then its likely to be a fairly new page. Additionaly try and get your link placed on a page with has unique and relevant content.

Try and think ‘Quality and not Quantity‘ when link building.

If you have 10 Quality links and 100 low quality links you are likely to rank better, depending on the value of each link.  Follow this tip and it will hopefully save time when trying to do any link building campaigns.

Web Directories

Another method of link building is to get one way links from Web Directories. There are many of them out there and some are free and some are paid for directories.

A Web Directory is just a site which is a large page link database categorised.

Some useful Web directories are:

Yahoo – Not free, but could be a worthwhile link
DMOZ – aka Open Directory Project is one of the oldest directories on the Web, you can submit your site for free.
BOTW – aka Best of the Web, another very old site, been around since 1994. This is free for 60 days but after this time will cost you a small fee but could be well worth it

Try and focus on Web Directories that have been around for years and have a good PageRank.

Article Sites

The preferred method of link building over Web Directories is by submitting articles to Article sites. This will allow you to write the content so that its related to the specific theme of your site.

Some useful Article Sites are:
Ezinearticles.com – been around since 1999
Goarticles.com – been around since 2001
ArticleBase.com – not been around as long, since 2005, but has a good ranking

Blogs and Forums

Get networking with communities such as blogs and forums as these often allow you to post a link back to your site.
You can find related blogs by using Googles blogsearch http://blogsearch.google.com.

Another useful tool from Google is the Google alerts. you can set-up alerts for certain keywords and get results e-mailed to you. This is great for being ahead of the game and you can either make articles or post of forums/blogs with some of the results found. This is great for targetting someone either writing content about that theme based on the keywords or possibly even posting a question about where to buy a product that you might offer.

Try and make sure when you post comments onto blogs or forums to make them useful otherwise your link may not be added.

One Way Links

Search Engines value one way links very highly especially if the one way link comes from a authority site and that the link is relevant to your site.

You can contant Webmasters directly asking for a link. This can be time consuming without much response as it will take time out of their day to review your site to see if they would like to add your link. They may even request a link back, but it would be preferred if you can get a one way link.

If you can be sincere when you ask for the link, maybe comment on there site or an article they have done, or even if you spot a mistake on the site, then you are building some trust.

There are many ways you can try and obtain one way links. If you are offering help for someone, such as free advice. You will see here a thread on Affiliates4u forum where this example has paid off – help and advice for newbies who need a kick up the backside in 2009.

If anyone has any other methods or recommendations that could help other affiliates, please comment below.
If anyone would like to offer a backlink or add our site to their blogroll to say thanks for this post, then it would be greatly appreciated.

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Being an Affiliate for almost 6 months now, do we qualify to help other newbies?

Well we’ve learned so much in that short space of time and its all fresh in our minds, so we think we can offer a certain amount of advice from what we have learned along our journey.

Our newbie in Question is Simon, a former colleague who is also technically savvy so didn’t really need a lot of explaining to tell him how things worked.

He has decided for his first niche site – Kettlebells. An up and coming trend in the fitness industry. This niche is maybe slightly more competitive than some might think especially for someone just starting out. Targeting only 1 keyword for the product itself as well as some long tail keywords for specific products, this will be a challenge, but one which could be a worthwhile investment.

Lets look at the competition:
There are approx 40,800 search results on Google with Kettlebells in the title.
1st and 2nd spot is taken up by 2 sites with strong keyword usage, with the keyword in the title, description meta tags and the domain name.

No 1 spot is kettlebells.co.uk and has a great domain name for that keyword. It has approx 700 backlinks and is approx 6 years old so may be hard to beat that position.

As part of our journey and interest in Affiliate marketing, we want to be successful and become SEO experts. Helping Simon and hopefully getting his site to the top 3 on Google will prove how much we’ve learnt and how much we may still have to learn.

Good luck Simon on you adventure.

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Today we noticed that one of our niche sites had dropped from Google for the keyword search terms maternity swimwear. We have started to analyze the site to try and figure out what could have made this suddenly drop

A quick look at Google Webmaster Tools and we noticed our Robots.txt file had several disallows for most of the main pages, but not the home page. We are not sure why this happened. The only recent change that we are aware of was that we updated the product feeds and had accidentally dropped the table in phpmyadmin. We had quickly re-created the table to update the product feeds, but for about 3-4 hours our site was not showing the products. We think this was because of the wp-cache plugin which has been causing us lots of problems recently. We had disabled this ages ago but it still seems to be caching. We knew the code in our php file hadn’t changed and that the sql statement was working ok, so must have been the caching problem.

Our site has been in top 3 position for almost 1 month now, soon after the launch of the site, so we are really confused why this would suddenly disappear.

We have also posted a question on Google Webmasters Forum, but some comments we got were not very constructive. We know the site needs some improving and will make some changes over the next coming weeks to help with this, but why would our site just drop.

A site:maternityswimwear.org.uk shows our site is also still indexed, so it doesn’t appear to have been penalised. Google Search for www.maternityswimwear.org.uk is still there.

Our only conclusion is that Google bots had tried to crawl our site when there was no content effectively so because of this our site has dropped to page 9 instead of page 1, position 1.

We will wait a few days to see if Google bot puts our site back where it belongs, at the top

Has anyone else experienced this problem, or can provide us with some advice, we’d like to hear your comments.

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Recently I have developed a website for a family member and after finishing the design, the next stage was to get it indexed into Google. Well we had problems at the first hurdle as the site was taking ages to get indexed even after posting here about it, which usually helps for our other niche sites.

I noticed that the site was indexed when typing in site:domain_name.com but it was only showing the website domain name and no meta description.

After analyzing the site, I came up with the following problems which could explain why it was not showing properly, but this is still unclear as to what the exact cause was.

1. Robots.txt file was set to Disallow /
   - We set this up while designing the site as didn’t want the pages to be indexed with incorrect content or pages and then have to ask Google to remove certain urls etc.
   - We had modified this to Allow / quite early on, but maybe it was taken some time for the google robots to pick up these changes. The robots test showed the correct information
2. We had some javascript on the main home page, this script was a basic expand and collapse text script so had hidden text but when clicked would display the text. This could have been seen by Google as spamming as we could be hiding keywords. But I’m sure loads of other sites use this and don’t have any indexing problems. Anyway this has been changed now to click through to another page, so no more javascript
3. No 301 .htaccess redirect file set-up so that our non canonical domain http://domain was not being redirected to the http://www.domain… etc. This could have been seen as duplicate content across the domain. This has now been set-up.

Well a few days later and more of the pages are being indexed with the description. Still though the home page or root of the site isn’t showing the description and I’ve triple checked the code, its no different than some of the other pages codes.

For those interested the family site is Expand Internationally or http://www.expandinternationally.com

Any comments/suggestions welcomed

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Recently Affiliate Project was approached by a family member asking for help with starting up a business adventure. They had seen and heard about our success with a few of our niche sites and how we have managed to get the sites listed in the top ranks on google in little time and sought our help to design, develop and SEO the site.

As we have only really had experience with using Wordpress to get our sites out there, it wasn’t straight forward to design the site as the requirements although basic weren’t really suited for Wordpress. Rather than hack a Wordpress theme to suit our needs, we decided to build the layout and style this from scratch using css and code with html with the help of Dreamweaver.

The site for any one interested to see our work is www.expandinternationally.com. Its basically a business website that is aimed towards companies that are looking to export services internationally. In this current market businesses are looking to cut costs and doing business overseas is one way business can save money. However its not that straight forward for companies and that is where Expand Internationally can help with over 100 years experience in doing business internationally.

Our challenge is going to be a little harder as we’re not trying to SEO a niche site. This is a business site and we need to try and understand the market and the target audience, but we love a challenge and this is what we’re in the Affiliate Marketing business for.

Hopefully the site will get up in the rankings so we can prove to the family that we are keen in doing Affiliate Marketing full time.

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After nearly 1 month since we launched the site maternity swimwear, we are very pleased with the results. This is only our 2nd niche site out there although we do have the odd few that still needs working on. We wanted to update our blog with some juicy stats as we are proud Affiliate newbies

Our main goal was to get the site to within the top 5 position on google.co.uk for the website domain keywords, as then this would hopefully make us some money. The site has been sitting at the top of page 2 or bottom of page 1, which we were happy about as the site has not long been out there and we hadn’t done hardly any linking. This was purely down to all-in-one-seo plugin on the site, the domain name, trying to use strong keywords, good descriptions and good heading titles.

Today the site ranks at number 1 position on google.co.uk when searching for “maternity swimwear” (exact) and number 2 spot for maternity swimwear (not exact) so we are well chuffed. We are also number 3 “maternity tankinis”.

I took a screenshot as proof (see below) as I’m not sure how long it will stay there for!!

I think the ranking position has got higher due to the fact that I spent the last few days doing some link exchanges for this site. Paul has also being getting in touch with his ‘feminine side’ and writing some really good content in the form of articles from his alter-ego yummy-mummy, well done Paul, or should I say yummy mummy

We are also getting an increase in the number of visitors to our site and in addition to this we have also had a pretty good month with our earnings. We have generated in excess of £1500 in sales, an average of over 5000 impressions, and nearly 30 sales, which is almost 1 every day.

We’ll see if this improves now that we are higher up on the rankings although because of this we may not get the ‘last click’ but we should see more traffic.

It is still a big learning curve for us, but one that we really do enjoy. Especially when you see results for the effort we are putting in.

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