Search engine basics

Maybe the single most important part of running an affiliate website is understanding how people find your site and how to make your site stick out among the billion or so other sites on the Internet.

If you’ve been using the Internet for more than an hour or two, chances are you know what a search engine is. Websites like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com have developed into multi-billion dollar corporations in the last ten years.

Using search engines is extremely simple. You just go to the site, type in what you want to find and click enter. But how can you make sure that your site will be found? As it turns out, it’s all about the keywords.

When a site like Google or Yahoo searches the Internet to come up with results from a web query, it takes the number of keywords on a site into consideration. It also takes particular keywords or phrases into account, too. If someone is doing a search for “Book about Rolling Stones,” a site that has that phrase or a phrase similar to it 10 times is going to come up higher than a site that only mentions it once. That’s why its so important to incorporate keyword text into your web content so that when someone does a search for, say, “Oolong Tea from China” and that just happens to be what your site sells, your site comes up high on the list, not buried on the bottom.

The trick is to incorporate these keywords or keyword phrases into your web content, and still have your content make sense. This is a super-tricky obstacle to get around. The best advice I can give is to simply read around and see what other affiliate marketing sites have done. Remember, your content is a huge part of your site. If people don’t stay on your site for a minute or two reading your content, they will never, ever click on any links you have and buy any products you’re selling. You must find the balance between a heavy use of keywords and well-written text.

Knowing how to use search engines is a big part of affiliate marketing. You can have the best content, the most timely links and the best product in the world and you won’t do a lick of business unless people can find you. Learning the art of incorporating keyword text into your affiliate website may seem tough, but it’s the difference between making a few bucks here and there and making it big in affiliate marketing.

Search Engine Optimization and Affiliate Marketing

In order to bring targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing website it is necessary to optimize your site. Optimization simply means getting your website ready for search engine submission. In order for your site to have a good position in the search engines it is very important to understand how to do basic optimization.

Keywords

Firstly you will need to do some keyword research. You can do this by going to http://goodkeywords.com and finding the best keywords for your business theme. You can also go to http://wordtracker.com to find more specialized or niche keywords. Make a list of them and base your content pages around one or two keywords or key word phrases. Optimize your pages at about 3% keyword density. This will be the general rule for optimizing your content.

Meta tags

Now you need only put in title and description tags. Also put in a tag to ask search engine bots to visit every 5 days.

For better Page Rank and good positioning in Google it is necessary to keep your website content fresh. You can do this by adding content every week. When you add lots of good optimized interesting content, both the search engines and your visitors will be happy.

Keep good resources for your visitors and you will also gain better Page Rank. This will also encourage other webmasters to link to you and get more back links.

Back links are also useful for raising your Page Rank. Other ways to get these is article distribution. You can either write them yourself or get others to do so. You can also go to this free website http://www.moreniche.com/tools.html and take advantage of their tools and advice. They will also provide you with free weekly content. You can modify them for use on your website or for article distribution.