You must have heard about this one before:
“I have about a gazillion backlinks, and my website is still not ranking on page 1.”
Let’s clear this one up real quick:
Your search engine rankings don’t JUST rely on backlinks. In fact, I don’t even think it has 60% Influence on your search engine rankings.
I have two words for you:
Website Structure
Remember these words, because they will change your life.
In this article I am going to stick up my middle finger to user friendly, because this is your job not mine.
I always keep in mind that 90% of web users are complete idiots, so I am going to keep this simple and I will explain this with disney pictures.
( This is a good tip for all you affiliates out there, Make your website as simple as possible so even a 85 year old lady with one eye can understand it. This will increase your sales!)
Let’s create a imaginary affiliate website.
The main keyword we are going to use is Dog Training.
Let’s say we have the domain Dog training guru.com.
We just created a good looking WordPress affiliate website to promote a guide on dog training. Our main goal is to rank for dog training.
So what do we title the website?
With most templates your website title will most likely be a H2 or a H1 tag. These tags are well read by the mighty Google and are given a high importance for keywords.
So instead of titling your blog Dog Training Guru, We title it Dog Training.
Most H2, H1 tag titles are direct links to your front page. With this title you will have a direct link from all your other pages to the front page with the title Dog Training.
You can also title your blog Dog Training Guru, and add alt and title tags with your main keyword.
<a href=”www.dogtrainingguru.com” alt=”Dog Training” Title=”Dog Training”>Dog Training Guru</a>
This way you are still telling Google that your website is about Dog Training.
Now that your title is set we need to add content.
Since this is not a long tail keyword and titling your front page article with Dog Training alone will look stupid, and won’t get the message across. Your article title is most likely a H2 tag, so you will want your main keyword in there. Make up a good selling, catching title and add your main keyword in there.
Something like:
Discover the best dog training secrets.
Now that we came up with a well keyword-ed front page title, we need to optimize our content.
Let’s talk about keyword density.
When you have a 500 word article and you have a keyword density of 10% you have your keyword repeated 50 times in your content.
Now 10% is way to much, but keyword density is very important.
When Google crawls your website it will pay close attention to the use of keywords. When your content repeats the keyword you are aiming for, you will simply rank higher because Google now knows your website is very related to the keyword you are aiming for.
Don’t go all crazy and spam your content with the keyword. I recommend keeping the density under 5% and above 2%.
Here is a little tip:
Bold and underline one of your keywords.
Even thought this has never been proven, I believe that having your keyword bold and underlined within your content helps.
Let’s have a look at our imaginary affiliate website:
That is one simple ass website, but the setup so far is perfect.
Let’s talk about adding more links.
First of all every website should have the following pages:
- Contact us ( Making your website less private.)
- About Page ( Explain what this website has to offer, try to use your keywords here and there.)
- Privacy Policy ( I hate this page, but Google likes to see it on your website. Guess it builds more trust.)
And you could add a Terms of use page for extra trust.
Do not forget to add these pages!
I am feeling pretty hangover today, so I am going to give you another great tip.
Link to a keyword relevant website with authority ( Wikipedia is often great.) from your about page.
Google loves Wikipedia, And Wikipedia helps you make Google “believe” your website is very relevant to the page you are linking to. In this case we would link to a page loved by Google that is all about dog training. ( PS: Do not link to your competition.)
Now we need to add articles to the website.
First thing you want to do is research long tail keywords for your article titles.
When you publish a article you will want the URL and the TITLE to be exactly like the long tail keyword.
Our article title will be:
How to train my dog
So the link for this article will be:
domain.com/how-to-train-my-dog/
In the article itself you will repeat this long tail keyword several times, and yet again make it bold and underlined once.
Use this concept with all your articles! This way you will have a website full of long tail keywords that can pull targeted visitors from the search engines.
Let’s talk inner linking:
The reason you will want to create inner links, is to add keyword importance to both your articles and front page links.
It is known that if you link to a certain part of your website several times, it becomes more important. Kind of having inner Backlinks.
What I like to do is place a link in a selection of articles towards the front page.
You will want to use the main keyword as link title, and don’t forget to add the alt and title tags as explained somewhere above in this article.
You will create more importance for the keyword dog training on the front page. ( This will only slightly increase your rankings.)
So how do we meta tag this bitch?
Meta tags is another thing you SHOULD USE.
Lets take the front page.
Title: How To Train Your Dog – Dog Training
Make sure the title of your website is relevant to the main keyword you are aiming for, and make sure you use your main keyword in the title. The rest is completely up to you, but always put yourself in the situation of the searcher and think about what you would click.
Which one would you click?
- Get your dog to obey in 5 days – Dog Training
- Get your dog to obey in 2 years – Dog Training
You will also need a meta tag description. The same here counts for the above, what would you click?
And obviously you will want the main keyword in there and have overall keyword relevance.
And for meta keywords, you will want the main keyword in there and I recommend adding the long tail keywords you chose.
On your articles you should do the exact same thing.
The long tail keyword for your article should be in the title, meta description and meta keywords.
You can do all the above with the plugin All In One Seo.
What about the affiliate links?
Finally it’s about time to place the affiliate links.
This subject is very important.
When you link away from your website, you are going to lose juice. And you simply don’t want Google to know you are a affiliate.
The best way to do this is cloaking your links, adding no follow tags and even disallowing bots for that link in your robots file.
I am going to link you to my favorite forum:
http://forums.nichechoppers.com/programming-web-development/6159-htaccess-redirects-cloaking-links.html
You might need to sign-up, but it’s more then worth it. This topic will explain every single step to cloak, nofollow and disallow your affiliate links.
Remember,
Back-links only tell the search engines that your website is the place to be for the keyword you chose, but when your on-site search engine optimizing is not done right Google will never rank you on the first page.
Your website should have the total picture. You can have a 1000 backlinks, but when your on-site seo is not done right your competition with only a 100 backlinks will easily outrank you.
Spend more time on on-site search engine optimizing and less time on backlinks.
