The Affiliate Marketer

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a complicated subject. It’s made all the more difficult by the fact that the search engines do not release details of their algorithms. Anyway, I thought I’d write down a list of SEO tips that I know, and hopefully my readers will contribute theirs in the comments. Where techniques are dodgy and might get your site removed from search engine indices, I’ll indicate that this is the case.

There are two factors that you can control, and one, on-page factors, is easier than the other, off-page factors. Here are on-page factors that I am aware of:

1. Writing at random doesn’t cut it. You need to try to make sure that what you write includes the phrases that you wish to optimise for. For example, in the case of this article, the phrase that I am targeting is “list of SEO tips.”
2. Include the phrases that you wish to optimise in the filename of the web page, the title, and as the contents of a <h1> element near the top of the page.
3. Only try to optimise for a small number of phrases.
4. Try to target phrases with limited competition, especially if you do not have a high number of links pointing to your site.
5. Emphasising the phrase within your article helps. For example, putting the phrase in bold, as in list of SEO tips, or in italics may help.
6. Adding relevant images to your page will also help. You need to include the keywords in the alt attribute. To avoid having the page removed from the indices, when doing this, you must make sure that the alt attribute contains an accurate description of the image contents.
7. Linking to other relevant webpages helps, whether these are internal to your site or external site links. For example, this page lists Wordpress SEO tips, and this site lists SEO tips for bloggers. I found these by searching Google for the target phrase. Make sure the pages that you link to are listed in the search engines, and the links will probably be more effective if the pages you link to have some pagerank.
8. When you do all the above, make sure that what you write is primarily intended for human consumption. If you write sentences such as “This article is about SEO tips. We researched many SEO tips to produce it,” as you see quite often on various sites, you may rank well in the search engines but that will only be the case for a limited time. As soon as a human reviewer discovers what you have done, your page as a minimum, and possibly your whole site will face a penalty in the relevant search engine.
9. Do not link to “bad neighbourhoods.” To identify a site that belongs to a bad neighbourhood, look in the search engines and see if it is listed. For example, to check whether The Affiliate Marketer is listed, you could enter “site:theaffiliatemarketer.net” as your search in Google, Yahoo and MSN. If you allow people to link from your site in any comments that they post, it’s wise to include a rel="nofollow" attribute in the link code.
10. It’s probably best to make sure that the URL is not nested deeply within your site. Search engines are reputed to partly rank the importance of a page partly by the level it occupies in the hierarchy of your website. If you have a flat hierarchy, you will probably attain higher rankings. For example, /list-of-seo-tips/ is probably better than /2006/08/23/list-of-seo-tips/ would be. You can use .htaccess to redirect accesses to a specific file if you wish to arrange this; that’s how Wordpress works.
11. It is known that what the search engines think of as “dynamic” pages are given a lower level of importance in Google than “static” pages. The search engines identify dynamic pages as pages that contain query parameters within the URL, for example, ?articleid=12345. You can use .htaccess to rewrite static URLs to appear as dynamic URLs, and this is one of the things that Wordpress does for you. Any page that contains the query parameter id will not be included in Google’s index.
12. “Doorway” pages, i.e. pages that contain content written to rank well in the search engines for specific phrases but redirect human visitors to a different page by the use of Javascript, may get listed, but your site will probably be removed from the search engine indices as soon as somebody finds out about it.
13. Include a tag of the form <meta name="description" content="Whatever the page is about" /> within the <head> element of your page, and try to include the keywords in it. Sometimes the search engines will display this snippet with your page listing, so it is also worth making sure that the description is extremely relevant, and something that is likely to attract a click from the user.
14. Content that changes on a regular basis, while remaining relevant to the search term, will tend to boost your rankings.
15. Try to make sure your page is short, and mainly includes content rather than code. Any styling you have should ideally be placed in a separate cascading style sheet (CSS) file that is linked from your site by the use of an element such as <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/style.css” /> in the head section. I’ve heard that it will improve your rankings, although I have no direct evidence that this is the case. It will certainly help you save on bandwidth costs, if nothing else!

Off-page factors include the following:

1. Links to your site! One-way links, i.e. links to sites with which you have not reciprocated, are more valuable than reciprocal links for this purpose. The more you have, the higher in the search engine results will be your
2. Links to the specific page you want to rank.
3. The anchor text, i.e. the text contained within the <a> element that links to your site, should be similar to the phrase for which you would like to rank.
4. Links to your site are generally only useful if they are links directly specified as <a> elements within the source code. If they are constructed by Javascript, they probably won’t help your rankings.
5. Make sure that whatever techniques you use to “entice” people to link to your site, such as article marketing or reciprocal linking, that you do not just use the same keyword for all links pointing to your site. The search engines are trying to use links as natural “votes” for your site; if you are artificially causing all links to contain the same anchor text then that can cause the page to be penalised, and it’s something that can be checked for by the search engines automatically.

One other tip that I have is to regularly read resources such as Matt Cutts’ blog “Gadgets, Google, and SEO“, and Dr Andy Williams’ ez SEO Blog. The search engine world changes every now and again, and you need to keep abreast of the changes if you are using SEO to generate visitors and revenue (and why else would you be using SEO).

That’s it for now; brain dump over. Please add to the list of SEO tips in the comments!

David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer