Today’s post will be a long one… I will address most of the details regarding search engine optimization, so that you can apply it and bring huge amount of search engine traffic to your website.

If you are into affiliate marketing, optimizing your website to rank high organically is a MUST. Search engine optimization is the process of designing your website to be search engine friendly and increasing your site popularity, so that it can rank on either page 1 or 2 of major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!.

Why is search engine optimization so important? When your website is properly optimized for keywords that your consumers used to type to find your services or prodcuts, your website will appear on page 1 or 2 of search engines, bringing you free clicks every day. These traffic are very targeted which will more or less translate into conversions such as sales or opt-ins.

Lets say that you are promoting a dog training affiliate product. Some of the keywords that you can optimize are “dog training” and “dog obedience”. When your site ranks on page 1 for these 2 keywords, you can expect a surge of targeted traffic to your squeeze page which you can convert them into opt-ins.

Choosing of keywords to optimize is very important. Before you determine what keywords to optimize, you need to study your market first. Who are your consumers? What kind of language do they use to find your products or services? Do they like to search for a broad term or very specific term such as the model-type of a product or the name of an e-book? All these are important information that you need to gather first before you apply search engine optimization to your pages.

Every search engine uses different algorithms to rank website. Unless you are working in the search engine company, you will not know exactly what is the exact algorithm do they use to rank websites. therefore, it is impossible for anyone to guarantee you a position in organic ranking, be it on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. However, there is a general guideline which you should follow to make your website relevant to search engines:

1. Have a search engine friendly website. Good search engine optimization practice starts from web design. When you are designing your website, you should have optimization in mind. Your website should not be build entirely on Flash or Java, if you want it to receive high ranking on search engines. If your website is built entirely with Flash or Java, you will prevent search engine crawlers to index your website, thus eliminating it from the search result completely.
2. Do not use too many images on your website. Using too many images on your website not only slow down the loading time, but also make it hard for search engine crawlers to index your site. However, a site without any image is very dull for your visitors. Thus, you should always establish a good balance between it.
3. Choose a keyword-rich domain name. If you are promoting a dog training affiliate product and wish to set up your own squeeze page, you should choose a domain name that is related to what you are offering. An example will be: instead of using yourcompanyname.com, choose dogtrainingsingapore.com as your domain name. In this case, your site will be more relevant to searchers and thus allowing search engines to award you with a higher ranking.
4. Choose the right hosting plan. If you wish to rank well in Google Singapore rather than Google Worldwide, you should choose a Singapore hosting plan. It will help your site to achieve a higher ranking faster. Again, you need to do your own research to find out the geographical location of your main target audience.
5. Tag your pages with important keywords. This is a very important step that you must do in order to achieve good ranking for your site. You need to place keywords that you intend to optimize in places such as the Title Tag, Meta Tags (Description and Keywords), Alt Tags (alternate descriptions for your images), and Header Tags (H1, H2).
6. Write keyword-rich content. Content is the most important thing that search engine crawlers look at when determining the ranking of a website. Try not to optimize more than 3 keywords in a single page. Place your keywords within your content and make sure that you don’t overdo it. If not, crawlers will think that you are spamming them and not index your site at all.
7. Set up proper internal link structures. Your site should contains good internal link to direct search engine crawlers to every other pages of your site. Always use keyword-rich anchor link to make your pages more relevant. Your site should also has a sitemap which list out all the links of your site. This sitemap serves 2 purposes: make it convenient for your site visitors to find any page of your site, and direct search engine crawlers to every page of your site so that all important pages can be indexed.
8. Try to have fresh content on your site. Not saying that static pages are bad, but fresh content tend to score better with crawlers. That is why blogs and news portals are getting all the good search engine rankings because they update their content almost every day, and crawlers like it!
9. Establishing your link popularity. Link popularity is an important ranking factor, especially for Google. However, it is not always true that a site which has the most backlinks will rank higher than a site with lesser backlinks. It is the quality and relevancy that counts. So, make sure that the backlinks you get are relevant to what you are offering on your site. One way to get backlinks is to write good content. With good content, you are enticing people to link to your site as they want to share your good information with their readers. This is call “Natural Linking”
10. Leverage on social media marketing (SMM). Social media marketing is very useful to your site optimization. You should participate actively in social media platforms such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Hubpages, etc. You should not just submit your own sites and articles. Recommend other sites or materials that you feel are useful to the community. This is the best way to blend into the community and earn the trust from your fellow members.

Hope that this post will be useful to you. Feel free to post a comment here if you have any question and I will try my best to help.

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