Gadooney.com

One thing I constantly talk about here is waiting for sites to get fully indexed in search engines, sandbox filters (which prevent your new sites and pages from displaying in search results for a certain period of time), and using good link structure and sitemaps to get all of your content indexed.

Once your sites are up and running, it’s very easy to see how many of your pages have been indexed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Before I show you how, though, be aware that a page being indexed and it showing up in its proper place in search results are two different beasts. Because of sandbox filters for new sites, your content may very well show up as being indexed, but it’s not yet in the mix of the actual search results, as far as ranking where it should be when the filter is lifted once your site is sufficiently aged.

Let’s start with Google. Run a normal Google search, and type in the following into the search box: site:www.gadooney.com (Type it exactly like that, with no spaces. And type it into the search box, not into the area in your browser where actual URLs appear.)

That will take you to a search results page that shows every page that Google has indexed for gadooney.com. To see your own site, simply replace gadooney.com with your own domain. The total number of pages indexed will likely be greater than actual posts or pages you’ve created, as most search engines index feeds and categories and other extraneous sections of your site as actual pages, especially if you’re using WordPress to manage your content.

To check Yahoo and MSN, repeat the above process exactly, as far as running a search in each search engine using the site:www.yoursite.com syntax.

What do you do with all that data, once you get it? Well, honestly, not too much at the beginning stages, as the value in the site: command at the initial stages is simply to check that the search engines are able to find all of your pages and index it. If they are, then you know that your link structure is working its magic and enabling search engine spiders to find your content. There’s more valuable data in the results from the site: command, but we’ll dig into that in a later post.

Let’s start off with a quick compare and contrast, looking quickly at two sites, then hopping back here. Just scroll down and view each site as a whole, without getting too bogged in details or clicking links or anything like that.

Patio to Pool

Cisco certification

If you had to make a quick, snap judgment, it’d probably be that the Patio to Pool site looks much better, slicker, and more engaging, while the Cisco site looks kind of crappy and cluttered. And you’d be exactly right, on all accounts, but one of the key reasons is a bit subtle.

I don’t have the design vocabulary to explain it well, but the use of images in the posts on the Patio to Pool site really adds a lot of oomph. Not only does it illuminate and illustrate the topic of each post, but it serves as a visual break, giving your eyes a rest from what would otherwise be a sea of text.

Not so much with the Cisco site, as it’s a bit difficult to focus on things, and the text seems overwhelming. As far as actual word count, the posts on both sites are generally in the same neighborhood, as far as length. But something as simple as inserting images really gives the Patio to Pool site some extra pop, making it look much more inviting and professional looking.

Another subtle bonus from including images in your content is that you can also put them to use for you as far as SEO goes, by using descriptive, targeted alt tags. If you mouse over the images on the Patio to Pool site, you’ll see a title like “Samsonite patio furniture” pop up. Search engines do, to greater and lesser extents, take image alt text into account when ranking pages, so adding images (with targeted alt tags that reinforce the title of the post and the keywords you’re pursuing) can actually give you a boost in search engine results. Usually not a huge one, but every little bit helps.

If you’re building affiliate sites for products, including images is pretty much a no-brainer, if they’re readily available. People love to see the actual products, so including product images will let you kill all sorts of birds with one stones.

Notice, though, the caveat that I added, which was “if they’re readily available”. That’s the only downside to including images, which is that they not only take some work to include in your content, but they’re not always easily found.

Some affiliate programs give you the tools to quickly find and locate images in their catalog (and link them to specific products), while others don’t, forcing you to do the legwork of finding the images that correspond to specific products, etc. Some programs host the images for you while others require you to serve them yourself. It varies pretty widely from program to program, with no real standard.

Like anything, you have to weigh how much time you’re spending in including images, as far as how valuable it might be to your site. In some areas, it’s simply not necessary, and you’ll do fine with very few images, while in others it’s more necessary.

If the affiliate program you’re working with makes it very easy to add images, it’s almost always good to do so, as they really do make your site more atractive. If it’s difficult to add images and doing so adds many hours to creating a site, well, that’s when you have to make a decision, as to whether you’ll likely get more ROI out of having images on pages or on spending your time creating more content.

This one is just for the WordPress crowd, and takes all of two seconds to implement, but one thing to be aware of with WordPress is that a few of its out-of-the-box features need tweaking, if you’re using it for affiliate purposes (or if you’re simply looking to get as much search engine traffic as possible).

The most important one, which I’ve simply gotten into the habit of changing every single time I launch a new site using WordPress, is the permalinks setting. Permalinks are basically the permanent URLS for your pages that WordPress automatically generates, whenever you create a new post or page. The default setting for these look like this:

http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192

That works fine as a URL link, as far as functionality goes, but it doesn’t help us from a SEO perspective. If you can, you should always try to incorporate the keywords you’d like to rank well for in search results into the actual URL. If you’re writing good content and picking good titles, the easiest way to do that is to simply use the title of the content in your URL. So if I were writing a page about “Blue widgets”, and it was titled “Blue widgets”, I’d prefer that the URL for that page look something like this:

http://www.bluewidgets.com/bluewidgets

instead of

http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192

Happily, there’s an incredibly simply solution, if you’re using WordPress. Just login and click on “Options” in the dashboard. In the sub-tabs you’ll see tabs for “General”, “Writing”, “Discussion”, etc. Click on the “Permalinks” tab there.

Once you’re on the Permalink tabs, you’ll see some choices there, with radio buttons. “Default” should already be selected. Click on the option below it, which is “Date and name based”. Hit the “Update Permalink Structure” button in the bottom right and voila, you’re done. All of those links that were previously not helping you in the eyes of search engines (the http://www.bluewidgets.com/?p=192 ones) have magically been converted into links with your juicy titles incorporated into the URL (now looking like http://www.bluewidgets.com/bluewidgets).

There’s pretty much no reason to ever use the ugly default permalinks settings, so this is one of those things that I have trained myself to always change, right after getting WordPress set up on a new site.

One thing many affiliates don’t consider when they’re first starting out is how to properly structure their site, as well as how to use internal links to maximum effect. You’re focused (rightfully so) on getting lots of good, juicy content out there, and not so much on secondary concerns like varying your anchor text links, creating sitemaps, and interlinking your content.

One of the reasons that I’m a big fan of using WordPress for affiliate sites is that it automatically addresses many of the link structure issues mentioned above. The category structure of most themes ensures that all of your content is both logically arranged, interlinked, and accessible to search engine spiders. Varying your anchor links and link titles is a snap and simply a click of an icon away. A click or two on the permalinks options can instantly ensure that all of your URLs have juicy, targeted keywords in them, as long as you’re using good titles.

Let’s unpack some of the link structure factors mentioned above and get down to the nitty and/or gritty details, as far as what you can do to ensure your site has good link structure throughout:

View Your Site Through Spider Eyes: Good link structure ensures that search engine spiders find and index every single page on your site. When a spider hits your site, it basically worms it way through it, following link after link after link. If your pages are interlinked well, with multiple avenues to get to destination pages, the spider will find every page, since there are many pathways through your site. If you have poor link structure, with only one possible route to some pages, much of your content may be missed and not indexed.

How do you help search engine spiders find all of your content? It’s actually pretty easy. Give them more than one way to navigate to each page. Using this site as an example, spiders can find pages via the Categories links, the Archives links, and the Latest Posts links. I also try to link from post to post as well in the text itself, which is another avenue.

Another great tool to help spiders (which I haven’t yet implemented here) is to publish a sitemap page, which gives yet another way for spiders to find and index every page on your site.

Get the Most Out of Your Internal Links: Internal links are the ones that you create yourself when you link to other pages on your site. These can either be in the body of the text on a page, like this link to the Google Adwords CPC tool, or broader navigational links.

The key with these is to use them, first off, as they kill two birds with one stone, as far as highlighting important pages to users and adding another layer of good site linkage. But another equally important factor is that these links are used by search engines to potentially boost your pages in search results, if you use them well.

Internal links should echo the content on the page they’re linking to and reinforce the keyword you’re trying to get search engine traffic for. In the above example, the title of the page of the first link is “Google Adwords CPC Estimateor Tool”, so I want the text of the link I’m using to reinforce that, which is why I used Google Adwords CPC tool. This is much, much better than another typical link I might have used, such as cool Google tool.

See the difference? Both read roughly the same and link to the same place but the first is very specific and reinforces the targeted keyword for that page, which is designed to get search engine traffic for terms like “Google Adwords CPC”, “Adwords CPC tools”, “Adwords estimator tool”, etc. The second works but it doesn’t add any potential boost to the page in search results, while the first one both works and can give a boost.

It’s also helpful to vary the structure of your internal links, using common variations. So if I link to that tool again, I get more bang for my buck if I use a variation like “Adwords estimator tool” instead of always using Google Adwords CPC tool. The benefit is due to the whole semantic direction that search engines are going, which I’ll ramble on more about in detail in the future.

One last thing is to not forget to title your internal links, as well. Hover your mouse over the links above and you’ll see that I also titled each link with a corresponding targeted term, reinforcing the keywords on the destination page. Vary this up as well whenever you can and don’t always use the same title. The boost here is more negligible but it’s a good habit to get into.

Categories Are Links, Too: If you’re using WordPress, don’t forget that your Categories are links, too, and should be optimized for the keywords you’re targeting. You’ll have less flexibility here due to space restraints and layouts, but just keep in mind that these should be optimized as well if possible.

If your site is about poker and you’re creating a category for pages that are poker tips, you’d always want to call that “Poker Tips” instead of simply “Tips”. Both work fine and both alert a surfer on the site that if they click on the category they will find tips about poker, but one is optimized for much more traction in search results than the other.

Don’t worry if it looks silly to have all your categories preceded with “Poker (whatever)” as in the example above. Yes, it’s a poker site, anyone on it knows that, yes it’s redundant, yes the category “Strategy” is obviously about poker strategy and not wombat hunting strategy, but always keep an eye towards the search engines in cases like that. If it looks hugely silly or will break your layout, fine, use the sensible name for categories, but if it only looks slightly odd, err on the side that will help you in search results.

Kick around in the affiliate world long enough and you’ll hear lots of talk about PageRank. It’s a pretty simple idea but has gotten largely been mangled and obsessed over past the point of recognition or common sense.

When discussing PageRank, what we’re really talking about is Google, and how Google ranks pages in its search results. PageRank is a  part of Google’s search algorithm that automatically determines how pages on similar subjects should be ranked in results. Keep in mind that there are other search engines than Google and while they may incorporate similar factors, when you talk about PageRank you’re really talking just about Google.

It’s easy for search engines to find and index content, and easy to return indexed content when users type in certain terms. Google finds many pages about “widgets” and when you search on “widgets”, bam, Google serves you up the 182,928 pages it’s indexed on the topic of widgets. That’s easy.

The hard part is for Google to determine which of those pages should be listed in the #1 search engine results pages (abbreviated as SERPs). What makes one page on widgets better than another one? How is “better” even defined? With the rise of affiliate marketing, how do you not only accurately rank all the worthwhile pages but also throw out spam pages that are designed solely to make money and are of no use to the average surfer?

The unique way that Google tackled the issue in the past was something called PageRank, which was basically a measure of how many sites linked to your site, and how popular those sites linking to you were. I’m simplifying here, for the sake of brevity, but that’s the basic gist of it. The measure of that popularity (a combination of total links to your site plus how popular the sites themselves were that linked to you) is called PageRank, which is displayed on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest.

Think of it as a popularity game. If 1,000 websites linked to you, the odds are that your content is pretty damn good. The pages on your site would then get a boost in search results over the pages on another similarly-themed site that only had 3 websites linking to it. Your PageRank would be higher than the site with similar content, so your pages would get a boost over theirs in the search results.

Extending the idea a bit, all links to your site weren’t created equal. Let’s say you have 100 links to your site, but they’re all from other sites that themselves were very popular and had a high PageRank. Your pages would tend to be listed higher than a competing site that also had 100 links to their site, but with all the links coming from less popular sites with low PageRank.

To see the PageRank of your site, download the Google toolbar and configure the options so that PageRank is displayed. Visit a site and in your toolbar you’ll see the site’s PageRank, which is displayed as a green bar that runs horizontally. Hover your mouse over the bar and it’ll show the actual PageRank number in a pop-up box, on the 0-10 scale.

That’s the basic idea of PageRank. It was a good idea and worked well, but, like all things where money can be made, savvy affiliates and SEO firms started gaming the system. An ungodly amount of hours was expending trying to manipulate PageRank, to spread PageRank more effectively thoughout sites so that all pages got a boost, to not leak PageRank to other sites, and on and on and on. For good reason, as boosting your pages in results directly relates to making more money.

PageRank still exists, and it’s still a factor in the ranking of search results, but it’s not as important as it was in the past, as Google is working to incorporate other similar factors into its algorithms, such as TrustRank and other semantic considerations.

Stepping back a bit, the real reason I mention this is to try to prevent you from disappearing down the black hole of spending too much time obsessing over or trying to manipulate PageRank. People waste a ridiculous amount of time debating the pros and cons of things like PageRank, TrustRank, amd REF=NOFOLLOW OR REL=NOFOLLOW, when all they need to do is focus on creating good content.

I know a sound like a broken record, but all you have to do to make money in the affiliate world is focus on writing good, targeted content that people search for. That’s it. Predict their questions and answer them. Pick niches where people have lots of questions and retailers or advertisers are lined up, salivating at the chance to answer their questions. Do that, over and over and over, and you’ll make a boatload of money.

If you get down to the bare bones of PageRank and TrustRank and other factors, they’re really just getting at a very basic truth. They try to identity and reward good content that people are interested in and value enough to link to. That’s it. If lots of people link to something, it’s usually good, interesting, entertaining, whatever. Cool.

That makes your life very easy, as an affiliate. All you have to do is write good stuff, and let the rest work itself out. Sure, you can write crap and compensate for it by all sorts of sneaky stuff to manipulate search results and generate traffic, but that’s not a recipe for long term success, and often more work in the end than simply creating good content.

At a certain point, sure, there’s some value in being savvy to all the latest news about the Google algorithm, and what should be tweaked over here, what could be optimized over there, etc. But in the beginning you’re always better off to simply put your blinders on and concentrate on banging out good content, without worrying about all the extraneous junk that can lead to endless fiddling and wasting of your precious time.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is basically the practice of optimizing your content for the best results in search engine queries by surfers. All search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, et al.) use a unique algorithm that they’ve developed that takes all of the pages they’ve indexed and tries to apply certain rules to it. So if two sites have a page about “wombat reproduction”, and someone in Thailand types “wombat reproduction” into Google and runs a search, one of those pages is listed in the #1 spot in the results, with the other being listed #2. It’s the ranking algorithms built into each search engine that make that decision.

Working backwards from that point, it stands to reason that if you optimize your content to take into account how search engines rank pages, then your page will more likely land in the #1 spot in search results, which means that it will be clicked more often than the #2 result, which means you’ll make more money as an affiliate. SEO, then, is that process, where you create and optimize your content in certain ways with the hopes of getting ranked higher in search results.

In some ways, SEO for affiliate sites is a very natural process and dovetails perfectly with good writing practices in general. Search engines weigh the title of a page very heavily when ranking results, so picking a clear, focused title for each page of content not only helps you in the world of SEO, it’s something that good writers of Web content naturally do, like breathing. That’s a win-win for you, as you don’t even have to think about it.

The same is true for keeping paragraphs relatively short and sprinkling your keywords throughout the body of the text. Again, it’s only natural that a good writer would do those things, as surfers don’t want to tuck into a solid block of text containing 172,182 words, and the repetition of the subject of the page is a very natual thing to do, for emphasis and clarity.

Which brings us to an important point. Many people like to insinuate that SEO is some black, voodoo magic, deriving from much complicated analysis and number crunching, and beyond the ken of mere mortals. To which I reply, heartily and succintly: “Bullshit.”

Stepping back a bit, as search engines evolve over the years and get smarter and better at what they do (finding and organizing content and hypothetically returning the most useful of what it finds to anyone querying it, in order of usefulness), they’ve done so in fairly common ways. Back in ancient times, search engines heavily weighed meta tags, which are basically invisible titles that people creating Web pages could embed in their pages, to describe in general what the page was about. That’s a decent idea, in theory, because the person creating the page knows best what it’s about, so why not value what they say the page is about.

In practice, though, it didn’t take long for sneaky monkeys to realize that, and start cramming in every word they could think of into the meta tags of every page they built, because it would generate more traffic, and more traffic is always better than less traffic. So search engines were suddenly being manipulated into returning very junky results, until it got too obvious and painful for them and they stopped adding extra value to anything in the meta tags.

This cat and mouse game has always gone on, where creators of Web pages try to manipulate search results in their favor, and always will go on. Search engines constantly tweak their ranking algorithms to combat that, as they have a vested interest in returning on-topic, useful search results. If they do, people use their search engine. If they don’t provide good results, people use the search engine that does provide useful results.

As search engines evolve, they’re more sophisticated, and more and more their efforts are focused on using semantic considerations into their rankings. That is worthy of a whole post of its own, but in a nutshell all that means is that search engines are increasingly aware of what good, focused on-topic writing is, and they can pick it out from all the trash out there. More and more, the SEO you should be doing when writing content is simply practicing good writing skills, such as strong titles, employing commonly-used synonyms ad associated words in your content, linking to other content on your site in natural ways, and so on.

In the past, SEO for affiliate sites typically included much more artifical methods to game the system, such as repeating keywords in both bold and italics, having keywords on each page with H1, H2, and H3 tags in descending order, maintaining a certain keyword density, having all internal and incoming links exactly corresponding to the targeted keyword phrase, etc.

Happily, though, that’s less and less the case, and good news for you. Instead of disappearing down a rabbit hole of endlessly fiddling and manipulating your layout and content, trying to play the SEO game, you can safely ignore a lot of that hoo-ha and mumbo-jumbo, and focus more on writing good, solid content. I’ll post more practical advice on this in the future but I just wanted to get the general gist of this out there, for anyone quietly obsessing over the fact that they’d heard SEO was the best thing since sliced bread but were worried that they knew nothing about it.

Here’s a dirty little secret. In this day and age, if you’re starting a website for affiliate purposes the domain name you pick is nearly meaningless. Yes, in some very rare cases you can do much research and unearth a peach of a domain name, but it’s almost always wasted time.

A “perfect” domain name would be one that has your key topic in it (or, in affiliate marketing parlance, your “targeted keyword”), as well as one that gets type-in traffic and is memorable. So let’s say you wanted to promote affiliate programs for cigars, and somehow, in a magical world, no one had registered cigar.com. That’s a perfect domain name for you, as it has your targeted keyword plus people simply type in “cigar.com” into a search engine if they’re looking for a cigar but have no idea who sells them online, just like horny monkeys type in “sex.com” for the same reason.

So that’s the theory of the perfect domain name. Now let’s bust it to pieces.

Search engines continue to move away from attaching any value to terms in your actual domain name (such as ranking you higher on search terms for “widgets” if your domain name is “justgreatwidgets.com”), because even a retarded chimp can game that system.

People like to pretend that understanding the inner workings of search engines are some secret, alchemical art, but in many cases it’s common sense. If you rank pages higher if they have the keyword in their domain and suddenly see an onslaught of domains and pages like “http://www.widgets-buy-online-great-super-widget.com/widgets.html”, well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that you should move the other direction, and stop rewarding spammy pages like that.

(Sure, argue with me all you want that Google still gives you a boost if your domain name has your targeted keyword in it, but I’ll bet you a box of doughnuts that over time that will steadily dwindle to nothing, if it isn’t already there.)

As far as great type-in domains and/or memorable ones, well, this one is obvious, as they’re pretty much all taken. The only ones not taken are too obscure to do you any good. Sure, midgetgoatsex.com is still available, but what in the world are you going to do with that? Umm, forget I asked.

People waste far too much time when getting started with affiliate sites searching for that perfect domain name. The reality, too, is that you’ll crank out mnay sites over your affiliate career, and it’s often better to launch new ones as stand-alone domains. If you’re about to start a new site and are struggling for a domain name, don’t sweat it. Just pick something. It matters very, very little.

Gadooney.com is a good example of the above. When faced with possibilities like “makemoneyfromaffiliatemarketing.com” or something equally silly, I couldn’t help but throw up in my mouth a little. So I picked a random nickname for a coworker that developed from Jebus only knows what dumb inside joke we were riffing on at the time. Within ten minutes from the decision to launch this site I had the domain registered, added to my hosting account, and was up and running.

Don’t get bogged down on choosing the “right” domain name. There is no “right” domain name. Grab something and get to work.