e107 | Wordpress | Affiliate Marketing

Following on from my previous post on trying to get across how SEO techniques are no secret and trying to share the idea that Google offer great resources to help beginners learn what they need to know, I wanted to share this great PDF from google.

This document puts together pretty much all any amateur website builder, or part time affiliate marketer really needs to know. Forget spending £100s on some course that will essentially share the same information, or worse still, will attempt to entice you into the world of "gaming" Google - which may have short term wins but why not just get it right once and then forget about it. If you follow Google's principles then you don't have to worry about updates to their engine. Each time the engine improves your site will stand a better chance of standing out.

Download the PDF here

It has been a long term annoyance of mine - this notion that optimising your site for the search engines is somehow a secret that only experts with years of industry experience can do. Companies charge 1000s for consultancy on SEO best practices so it must be some difficult hard to understand skill?

No. It's not hard. I work for one of the UKs leading consumer websites and we have a team of search guys and, no disrespect to them as it is still a job that needs to be done, I can see first hand that it isn't rocket science. All you need is common sense and the ability to read!

Want to learn more?
Google, the search Daddy, makes no secret of what they look for in a site. They want a page to be correctly tagged up, they want a page to be useful, they want it to say something. They want to be able to tell what the page is about.

They want other sites to vote for your site by linking to it, the more links from more respected sites the better. The idea behind this is that your site needs to be liked by lots of other people.



See, it's not hard!

Like I said before, Google make no secret of all this - all you need to do is read!

So the vbulletin community isn't too impressed with the bugs noted in vbulletin 4 so far. But anyway, I've fixed one that I had so I thought I would share it.



This arose from imported forum members having a birthday of "--". I simply updated this to be a blank string, ie "".



This problem was causing the user profile pages of these imported users to go all out of sync too. Hope it helps someone out there, and remember to pop by my vb forum and sign up if you own any Samsung stuff!

Quick update on some 2010 activity!

SammyWiki.com
Taken the plunge and installed the new vbulletin CMS. If I am honest I think I expected more from a commercial CMS package but I have to admit the feature set is very rich. I guess when you start comparing to WordPress any back end admin system doesn't look so good.

Sure, Wordpress is more limited in scope but they make things like theming and widgets easy, vb4 seemed a little less user friendly to me. Still, the forum is (obviously) very well constructed and looks great.

Still to do:

• Mediawiki and vbulletin 4 single sign on
  
• Theme changes
  
• Rules, privacy policy, etc
  
• Content!
  
• Mediawiki blacklist plugin
  
• Get people to sign up!
  

Interested in helping me get a forum of the ground? Check out the unofficial Samsung wiki.

Plugin Development
Made some small but useful steps on the development of my affiliate plugin. I have some demo easy content unit style boxes running on a site I have been helping to develop. Check out Striped Tights for some early examples (eg on the TightsPlease page). Got some good ideas on the way and look forward to bringing this plugin to my Sammy sites. It's about time we had some functionality to find the cheapest samsung netbooks and check stock, etc.

Textbroker
Since settling up with HMRC I now know what profit I have available and can make some choices about putting some money back into other sites. In the short term I am going to try buying in some articles from Textbroker.com - I will write up in more detail how this goes another time.

I've made a few comments on various forums recently about how I think search engine evolution will change the game for affiliates.

The reality is, and I've proved this myself, it is possible to rank well for terms even if your site is rubbish. A couple of posts in prominent blogs have touched upon this:

• Scobleizer
  
• Battellemedia
  

It is the second post that really sums up my own feelings.

Failed Affiliate Sites
I often read on forums beginners asking why their site isn't working all that well. I nip over to the site and see what appears to be a very standard template. A keyword optimised site, with some badly written text that doesn't really offer any considered insight or opinion. The "reviews" are just rehashed marketing blurb and it is clear the site author has no real experience of the products being offered. The site doesn't rank because it sucks!

The idea is that they want to rank highly in the search engine, get people on to the site, and get them off. Now don't get me wrong, I have made sites like this too, some of them make a few hundred pounds a year which is not bad for a one off afternoon site build. But it makes sense to me that Google *shouldn't* be rating these sites well. It makes sense to me that Google will get better and better at removing such sites, or dropping them down the rankings in favour of content that really adds something to the Internet.

Domain Value
Another annoyance of mine is that Google weights domain keywords so heavily that real content sites struggle to get above them. For example, at the time of writing Google Ranks SamsungNC10.co.uk above my own SammyNetbook.com:

• Samsung NC10

So whereas my site has a community with 5000 members and hundreds of thousands of posts, photos, regular news, content, a wiki and lots more. The affiliate blog site with just over a massive 5 posts in 2009 ranks higher. I have nothing against this other site, I just think it isn't as useful to someone researching the NC10 netbook and should be ranked lower. The recommended products seem to have been picked from Amazon at random and the lack of "meat" to the text suggests the owner has little real experience with netbooks!

Google needs to address this and sooner rather than later.

The Domain Name Land Grab
And finally, a good generic .com domain is now impossible to find, .co.uk domains are still there but getting rare, and other TLDs are not given so much weighting by Google. Again, this needs to stop.

If not, Google is in danger of stifling entry into the Internet, why should a good site be denied just because it's creator was born too late to snap up a good .com?

The solution to this is easy, we just need to open up TLDs and Google should weight them all depending on their ease of registration (I can see why edu, gov, etc should have a higher status). Unfortunately, there will be much resistance to this from the "owners" of the current Internet. Obviously if new TLDs are created and they have a chance in the search rankings then this will devalue their existing domains.



These people are also more likely to be influential in the Internet world and will come up with all kinds of reasons as to why TLD expansion should not occur. The more rational amongst us will realise that there is no good reason not to allow this expansion, a .com ending is no guarantee against a malicious site as it is. Registering a .com domain first is no indication of a site's quality.

Like I said, those that have invested heavily in large domain name portfolios will resist this heavily so as to not see the value of their domains drop to nothing. But the value of a site should be based on the content, not the name.

Google knows this, so it's just a matter of time...


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