For great placement on search engines, you should use
great content articles, drawing targeted traffic to your
website as well as providing search engine spiders
something they can tell is valuable.
The better your content
is, the more likely your customers will become that most
valuable type of customer: a repeat customer. By using
original articles by you, or by purchasing them from article
directories or article brokers like YourOwnArticles.com,
you can keep your website filled with fresh, keyword-rich
information.
Keyword-rich articles are what spiders (the automated
programs used by search engines to catalog websites) look
for when they go to new websites. If a spider can easily tell
that you're selling rubber chickens, it can then catalog you
with the other people selling rubber chickens so that
searches for that term bring up your website as well as
similar ones. People used to do this with metatags –
information in the header of a webpage – but so many sites
were loading the metatags with terms that had nothing to do
with the page the search engines stopped cataloging them
heavily. Now they look for those key words in the text of
your website, particularly with header tags and in the early
part of your site content.
By keeping your content fresh and unique, you can keep the
customers that find your website in these searches. Keeping
your page simple and with few graphics will keep your
customers coming back for more content as often as you can
add new content to the site. Pages should be easy to scan
and laid out well, and the site should be easy to navigate.
Affiliate Links: Another Source of Income and Traffic
By including affiliate links on your website, you can make
extra profit while improving your ranking in the search
engines.
Affiliate links are links from your website to someone else
who's selling something. A good example is a book review
website that includes links back to Amazon for each book
reviewed; if you have an affiliate agreement, Amazon tracks
the click back to the site that referred it – the review site, in
this example – and credits them with the visit. Generally,
click-throughs earn a certain amount of money, and in some
cases a sale earns even more. The affiliate also links to your
website somewhere on theirs, ideally herding even more
traffic back to you.
But how does this improve your ranking? Most people know
that the search engines look for keywords when ranking web
pages. The number of links to your website also influences
your position in the rankings. If you have dozens of links
from affiliates to your site, the search engines will note that
and your position will move up; after all, with dozens of links
you must be an important site!
So how do you get these affiliate links? The most important
thing you can do is make your website valuable to the
affiliate. When you link to another site, it's as if you're
saying, here, look at this website, it's good. It becomes a
personal recommendation. If your site has little or no value,
that looks terrible on the affiliate.
If, however, your site is crammed with excellent
information, you make the affiliate look good; he or she is
providing a valuable service. For instance, you have a recipe
website, from which you want to sell spices, special blends,
and cooking accessories for an affiliate cooking store. If you
have six recipes copied from the back of a Betty Crocker
cake box, you're not likely to have a good reception from the
cooking store. They would not appear very intelligent if they
linked to this sort of website.
If, however, you have hundreds of good original recipes or a
very complete Cajun recipe database or some other
especially valuable content, the cooking store is much more
apt to want to link to you. And there you go: you're selling
the spice mixes you're recommending in your recipes, right
on your website. And the store supplying the mixes is linking
back to you, which increases your level in search engine
rankings.
Better yet, if you use hyperlinks from the recipe, you can
slip the affiliate links directly into the text of your content
articles. Your website isn't cluttered with someone's ads, and
you have supplied an easy way for your site viewers to get a
needed article. And you make money doing it! Thumbnail
graphics – graphics that have been physically shrunk to
postage-stamp size to save space – are another excellent
way to slip links into your page unobtrusively. Make certain
you shrink them in a graphics program, not by resetting
image size in your web design program! This is crucial to
make the graphics worthwhile.
