This post is a follow up to Part 1, where we discussed an Intro into Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing consists of many different variables. Article Marketing/Bum Marketing is a great way for newbie Affiliate Marketers to get their start. You can use a wide variety of methods to gain High Rankings in the Search Engines, including using other Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages. But first, you should understand basic Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important factors of becoming a successful Affiliate, in my opinion. Of course, for those who simply rely on PPC, this isn’t always the case… but as a Newbie, let’s stick with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) first.

SEO needs to start in the planning stages of any new website. This means that before you even start building a website, SEO needs to be considered. From the start, you should focus on Keywords that users might use to find your Website or Products. But, let’s get something straight here…

There’s a lot of great SEO tools out there, but some people seem to get caught up with relying on these tools, too heavily, even before they use their biggest, most powerful tool… their brain.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but it’s something that NEEDS to be taken seriously… you need to design your website on paper and then make notes on what needs to be done, prior to getting started with the actual creation of it all.

SEO Structure is important. Some believe that using nested tables in your HTML code is not as effective as using XHTML and pure CSS design, using Div tags. I have not designed a website using tables for… I guess it’s been approximately 3 years now? For me, it has become natural to use table-less design structure in my websites.

But I won’t get into too much HTML jargon…

Let’s go over some basics of Search Engine Optimization, shall we?

Search Engine Optimization Basics:

All Search Engines use what’s called a “Spider” or “Crawler” that indexes your page into their own Database. Actually, here’s what Dan Thies says in his book on Sitepoint.com: The Search Engine Marketing Kit (an excellent product):

Major Tasks Handled by Search Engines

There are five major tasks that each crawling search engine must handle, and significant
computing resources are dedicated to each. These tasks are:
Finding Web pages and downloading their contents.

The bulk of this task is handled by two components: the crawler and the scheduler.
The crawler’s job is to interact with Web servers to download Web pages and/or
other content. The scheduler determines which URLs will be crawled, in what order,
and by which crawler. Large crawling search engines are likely to have multiple types
of crawlers and schedulers, each assigned to different tasks.

Storing the contents of Web documents and extracting the textual content.

The primary components at this stage are the database/repository and parser
modules. The database/repository receives the content of each URL from the
crawlers, then stores it.

The parser modules analyze the stored documents to extract information about the text content and hyperlinks within. Depending on the search engine, there may be multiple parser modules to handle different types of files, including HTML, PDF, Flash, Microsoft Word, and so on.

Analyzing and indexing the content of documents.

This is handled by the document indexer. The text content is analyzed by the indexer
and stored in a set of databases called indexes. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer
to these indexes as simply “the index.” Included in the indexing process is the preliminary
analysis of hyperlinks within the documents, feeding URLs back into the
scheduler and building a separate index of links. The main focus of this phase is the
on-page content of Web documents.

Link analysis, to uncover the relationships between Web pages.

This is the work of the link analyzer component. All of the major crawling search
engines analyze the linking relationships between documents to help them determine
the most relevant results for a given search query. Each search engine handles this
differently, but they all have the same basic goals in mind. There may be more than
one type of link analyzer in use, depending on the search engine.

Query processing and the ranking of Web pages to deliver search results.

The query processor and ranking/retrieval module are responsible for this important
task. The query processor must determine what type of search the user is conducting,
including any specialized operations that the user has invoked. The ranking/
retrieval module determines the ranking order of the matching documents, retrieves
information about those documents, and returns the results for presentation
to the user.

Now, obviously, I don’t expect you to fully understand everything he’s saying, but I figured I would let one of the most highly respected SE Experts do the talking, rather than me… so I don’t sound too stupid and all!

Website owners love these Spiders/Crawlers. They are what eventually bring us traffic. Without Traffic, we are nobodies. The fact is - unless you have Millions of Dollars to spend on Pay Per Click Advertising, you NEED to learn Search Engine Optimization to a certain degree…which I believe is the basics, at a minimum.

There’s two components of Search Engine Optimization — On site SEO and Off site SEO.

Let’s start with On site optimization…

This is optimizing the actual website to get the best results possible. Your website is focused around Keywords (what users are typing into the Search Engines to find you) that are related to your site, company or product.

Take for example, a company named “Blue Widgets, Inc.” that is based out of Los Angeles, California. Their product is actually called “Blue Widget” and is gaining a lot of popularity as of late.

Now Blue Widgets, Inc. decides that they need to upgrade their website as it’s not very practical and they’re hoping for more traffic as well.

So Blue Widgets needs to figure out what people will be searching for so that they can find their product and website. They need to understand that the average searcher will not type in their industry lingo to find their product, so they need to ask around and find out what people DO search for when they want to find information on the “Blue Widget”.

In the end, they decide that their most popular keywords are (including a possible misspelling):
Blue Widget
Blue Widgets
Blu Widget
Information on Blue Widgets
Where to buy Blue Widgets
How much is the blue widget

So they now need to focus on the structure of their Website and realize that their pages need to include these words.

So Blue Widgets, Inc.’s home page need the following:

Title tag needs to include the main keyword
Include Meta Tags (just in case)
Use H1 Tags with their Keywords for the page
use Keywords in their links and Navigation, if possible
Focus on Keyword Density within their pages

* Keep in mind that Crawlers/Spiders read Websites from the top left - downwards.

Blue Widgets need to keep these “rules” in mind when creating their website.

What Blue Widgets also needs to keep in mind, is that their domain “BlueWidgets.com” (sorry if this is a real website, I did not check!), might not automatically come up #1 in the Search Engine just because their main keyword is in the URL. Take SEO.com, for example! (do a search for SEO on google)

But, having keywords in your domain IS helpful, in most cases. I tend to use keywords on page names, too… such as “http://www.bluewidgets.com/information-on-blue-widgets.html”, but it doesn’t always mean that the page automatically gets listed high in the results. Although, I am listed #1 for some semi-high competition keywords for several review sites I own.

When you do a search on Google, you will more than likely notice different results… you might notice “sponsored results” at the very top and to the right, while Organic Results will be placed on the left, un-highlighted.

The Sponsored Listings are what we will be discussing in a separate tutorial. These listings are what you would call “Pay Per Click Advertising”.

Here’s where you would see the Sponsored Listings (PPC listings):

And here is what we are discussing: Organic Listings, created by Search Engine Optimization:

Notice how the Search Engines Bold the Keywords that were typed into the Search box? (”search engine optimization”)

This is actually the Title of the webpage. Google sees it as being relevant to the search, so this is why you are seeing as being bold.

If you look at the top of this website (ClintLenard.com) you will see the Title tag appearing at the top of your browser. The Title tag of your Website is VERY important for Search Engine rankings, as it’s the first Keyword that Google Spiders will see (remember, Crawlers/Spiders read from the top left - on down).

This is one of the most, if not THE most, important parts of On page SEO.

But you will also notice that the Description of the page, taken by google, also has the Keyword bolded (The description is underneath the title of the page on the Google [organic] Results).

The Description is usually taken from the Meta Tag “Description”, but Google can also take a ‘clipping’ from the website and list IT as the Description, too.

The Keyword Meta Tag is, in my opinion (and most others), is almost useless these days due to what is called ‘keyword stuffing’, used by Black Hat SEO’s in the past (Black Hat is bad, White Hat is good… kind of like Spy vs. Spy, member? You memberrrr..). I sometimes use them, but not because I really want to in most cases. It’s just an old habit, I guess.

Since we’re on the subject… be sure to go by the Search Engine’s rules. Trying to fool these Search Engines is a useless task that WILL get you banned. Sure, a #1 position on Google for a high volume term might be worth while to a spammer with a throw away domain, but we’re talking about building a legitimate Business here. Right? I hope so! Play by their rules or don’t play at all… K? Good.

On with the show…

Let’s take a look at Bruce Clay’s Website where he ranks very high for the term “Search Engine Optimization”:

Notice the term “Search Engine Optimization” is in the Title tag and you can see that I underlined it within the content, sprinkled about very nicely…

Nothing spammy about it, yet it has the keyword several times in the Document.

Keyword Density is definitely important. You want to use your keywords in the content but you do NOT want it to look as if it’s written for the Search Engines. When writing, always write for HUMANS! But definitely include your keywords in the content…

Notice that the term “Search Engine Optimization” is also included above the actual Content? While this is actually considered a Bread Crumb (to know where the user is), it can also be considered the Content Title to a Crawler/Spider.

Your navigation (menu) can also play a key role in your SEO efforts if it doesn’t seem to spammy… but we won’t dig into that at this point.

Let’s take SEO to a different level here…

Let’s say that you were writing an Article to submit to EzineArticles.com and you were trying to rank high for the term through the article itself.

We’ll say that we’re an Affiliate for Blue Widgets, Inc. and we want to write an Honest Review of the product “Blue Widget”. Our Article Title needs to say what we want the user to type into the Search Engine… so the Title will say “Blue Widget Review”.

I’m going to keep this simple, so we will put this into the search engine: “blue widget review” (exactly like that, with the quotes around it). This is called an exact phrase. This means that we’re looking for that EXACT keyword on Google’s result pages.

As you can see, there’s actually 6 results… which would give us an easy task at hand if we wanted to come up #1 for that listing! But, since we’re playing pretend… let’s pretend that there were 6,000 results. NOW we have 6,000 pages that we need to consider as competition.

Thankfully, EzineArticles.com gets high ranking in Google… Google loves this site. So our term “blue widget review” should be an easy #1 target.

So the title of our Article that we will submit will be: Blue Widget Review

Now we want to include this term approximately 5% of the time in our Content… of course, we don’t need to hit this exact number. We just need to be sure to include it a few times in the article. So let’s place it as the title (as we’ve said), within the first line, within the middle of the article and towards the end of the article. Easy enough, right?

Yep, it’s that easy. Just don’t sound spammy when you’re writing the article or you’ll kill your chances for higher rankings in the end!

Be sure to bold your keywords at the right times… not too many times or, once again, it will look like you’re writing for the Spiders, which is not a good thing.

On your website, be sure to create a Sitemap so that the Search Engine Spiders and even your visitors can find all of your web pages.

Regular content is something that Search Engines love. Keeping your Website fresh with Articles, Blog posts, or even new static pages, will keep the Spiders hungry for more.

This is pretty much the basics of Onsite SEO. We haven’t touched Off-site SEO, yet, because I’ve run out of time. I will update this post with more information once I get the chance!

Well, I cannot lie… my hands are actually cramping up from all of this typing so I need to cut this short… on that note, I will be adding a second part to this module. I hope I didn’t go too off topic, I hope this made sense and I hope I didn’t make too many errors (I may have, my eyes are killing me and it’s getting late!).

Hope this helps explain some of the basics!