Bill McRea

Get paid to share your links!

When it comes down to it, SEO is all about finding ways to make your website as appealing as possible to the search engines (mainly Google) so that they will send you as much free, organic, search engine traffic as possible. So, if you have an affiliate marketing blog, SEO is something that is always on your mind. In this article we’ll look at five tips that you can use to help your affiliate blog get found so that you can attract targeted traffic and make more sales.

1. Quality content is job one

With all of the upheaval caused with the Google updates you can no longer get away with poorly written, low quality content on your sites. Now affiliate marketers must find ways to create better quality content that falls within Google’s new content guidelines.

The freshness of your content also matters as does the relevance. You’ll want to mix it up and provide your visitors with a variety of content formats such as audio, and video in addition to text. Interact with your visitors and encourage lots of user generated content. In the end it is quality, fresh, relevant keyword-optimized content that will attract the human visitors and the search engines to your site.

2. Make your site mobile friendly

Mobileis sizzling hot at the moment. We are coming into a time when smart phones are taking over and more people are accessing the Internet on mobile devices—that is cell phones, tablets and other Internet ready devices—than with their desktop or laptop computers. You can even take a peek at your analytics and see how many of your current visitors are accessing your site using mobile browsers. If you want mobile users to stick around and access what your affiliate marketing blog has to offer, then make sure that there is a version of your site that provides a satisfying experience for your mobile visitors who are viewing your content on a tiny screen or a touch screen.

3. Be active in social media

Since the Google plus your world update, the importance of having an active presence on Google+ was underscored. With this new update, when the people in your network do a search using any of the keywords associated with your niche, your Google+ profile results will appear on the first page of the search results they get.

You also want to be active daily and in some cases several times a day on Facebook because of the SEO benefits of the inbound links. Create a business page, and use the Networked Blogs app to gain more exposure and links to your blog.

Twitter is as important as ever to help boost your SEO because of the inbound links from a high page rank site. With Twitter you want to be on the lists of influential people in your sphere, and create lists that people want to be on and subscribe to.

5. A new link building strategy

Since traffic is the life’s blood of your affiliate marketing blog, you’ve got to stay up on all of the changes that are happening in the search engine world. You’ve got to develop a new link building strategy that focuses on quality over quantity. One of the best ways to get high quality, targeted inbound links is to do guest posting gigs. Make a list of the top five blogs in your niche and make contact with the authors. Offer to do a guest post for them and in return you’ll get exposure to a new audience and a high page rank link back to your blog. Do this often enough and you’ll begin to see the benefits accumulating.

To successfully attract as much organic search engine traffic as possible become a student of SEO. Take action on these tips with your affiliate marketing blog and test and track your results.

If you found these SEO tips useful there’s more where these came from. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog for more information about growing your affiliate marketing blog today.

Get paid to share your links!

The title of this article very well might have been, ‘How to Keep Up With the Constant Changes with Google,’ but that’s an impossible task, so we’ll tackle what we can here. Article marketing is an, ‘old school,’ online marketing strategy that has traditionally helped bring in lots of targeted traffic, while building backlinks to help boost SEO.

The basics of article marketing have not changed, which is part of the beauty of the simplicity of it.

What has changed with the recent changes at Google was in changing the way they rank websites, a lot of content farms and some article directories lost their high rankings, and with that they lost a significant portion of the traffic they had been receiving. Less traffic to the article directories, of course, means less traffic from the articles people were posting there.

What was the goal of the Panda updates?

The infamous Google Panda updates were just a few of the hundreds of improvements they made to their search engine. Google’s ranking algorithms reportedly remain unchanged, however, the Panda update involves adjustments to the system making it more accurate. The changes are designed to make sure that the most relevant pages are ranked highest in the search engine results pages.

Relevancy and quality are the buzzwords of the moment when it comes to article marketing. Two other important buzzwords are quality over quantity. Google’s mission is to constantly weed out low quality, duplicate content and spam.

What can you do?

If you have been experiencing diminished results for your article marketing efforts, there are lots of things that you can do to improve them, but I will warn you—they are neither quick nor easy. Remember the watch words, “quality over quantity.” If you had been cranking out a ton of low quality, keyword stuffed articles full of spun content, then it’s clear that it’s time to step your game up and start writing higher quality articles written to be read and understood by your human visitors rather than to satisfy the search engine spiders.

Basically, Google has raised the bar significantly when it comes to ranking content and websites. They are demanding quality, relevant content or it will not rank well.

Tips for boosting your results from article marketing now:

I’ll warn you that you’ll not find any earth-shattering ‘secret methods’ here. You may look at these tips and think you’ve seen this all before, but if you are not implementing them then they are not helping you one bit, right?

• Focus on providing a quality experience for your readers. Quality over quantity means that you might end up with fewer articles because you are spending more time researching the content and writing thoughtful, accurate, compelling articles.

• Be trustworthy. Do your research, cite your sources and give credit where credit is due to other authors. Provide more than one point of view on a topic. Be fair and transparent.

• Proofread your work. An article that is full of spelling and grammatical errors will cause the reader to doubt the credibility of the author. If you can, have someone look your articles over and give you their feedback before you publish them.

• Ask yourself if this is an article you would share. When people share content with their network it will reflect on them if the piece turns out to be a bunch of crap. Write something that you would be proud to see being passed around.

No, the Google Panda update did not kill article marketing. Hopefully, it did kill off the idea that you can crank out a ton of crappy articles and still expect to get quality, targeted traffic from it.

Article marketing is just one of the ways that you can generate targeted traffic to your website. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover lots of ways to grow your online business with Internet marketing techniques today.

Get paid to share your links!

Last week Google launched the latest change in the world of search with its, ‘Search Plus Your World, (SPYW)’ and there’s been lots of reaction in the online world. Basically, what Google has done is insert content from Google+ personal profiles into search results. Now, when you do a search it is populated by relevant content that people in your G+ circles has shared.

There has been an angry backlash from Twitter, evidenced by a statement from their General Counsel who said that the day SPYW launched was a, “bad day for the Internet,” and, “. . . bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”  All squabbling between competitors aside, ‘Search Plus Your World,’ brings lots of changes that will have an impact on your branding efforts and your website’s SEO. Let’s take a look at what these changes mean for you as an online business person.

Because SPYW is now integrating social media content from Google+, it underscores the importance of having a strong showing on Google Plus both personally and with a G+ brand page. Then, when the people in your circles search for content related to what you have to offer, your content will be brought to the forefront of their attention.

You’ll also want to build out your G+ brand page and get it added to the circles of those who are influential within your industry to make the most of this added visibility.

As far as SEO goes, SPYW will have an impact on how people will be finding your site and your shared content. Make sure that you are including links back to your G+ profile, which should be filled out completely with links to all of your relevant pages, keywords and lots of excellent content.

Privacy seems to have become a concern with all of these personal results being aggregated in one place. According to the Google blog, the results page for ‘Search Plus Your World,’ results is secured with SSL encryption by default for users who are signed in to their Google profile.

Keep in mind also that if you absolutely hate SPYW because you feel like its cluttering up your search results, you can simply turn it off with a click on the icon at the top right of the Google search results page. The head and shoulders icon included personal results, and clicking on the globe icon hides personal results from your searches.

As with any big change it’s a bit too early to tell how successful SPYW will be, and if people will embrace it or ignore it like many of Google’s previous changes. For now, the big takeaway seems to be the urgency to make sure that your Google+ profile is representing you powerfully, and that you are sharing useful, relevant content with your circles so that when they do a search you show up and remain top-of-mind with your target audience.

Search engine marketing is just one aspect of running a successful online business. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover more tips and information about growing your business using Internet marketing.

Get paid to share your links!

If you are a website owner or a blogger who is not also an SEO wizard, you might occasionally feel a little bit overwhelmed when you think about all of the things you have to learn about getting the right traffic to your website. But with all of the upheaval that the Google updates have caused, there are three simple factors that you can address on your website that will help improve your website’s search engine optimization so that you can start attracting more free, organic search engine traffic.

 1. The importance of a website’s perceived value

Never before has it been quite as important for you to become known as a trusted authority in your market, but your website must reflect the value that you offer. Focusing on providing a unique, relevant, visitor experience with content that is valuable and compelling encourages users to interact with your content, and even share it with their friends. Invest the energy and resources into creating an enriching experience for your users that will boost your website’s perceived value both in the eyes of visitors and search engines.

 2. Social Signal

According to seomoz.com, social signal is a critical factor in SEO in this post-Panda environment. Including links to your active social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc. help search Google determine how connected you are, and what kind of authority you have within your topic/ industry or niche.

The marketing consulting website, corprominence.com, describes social signals in this way, “The extent to which your brand is able to create connections and expand its network is determined by the extent to which it creates active social signals. An active signal is a two-way connection based on an exchange of value.”

Source: corprominence.com/social-signal

 3. Leverage effective on-page SEO

A properly optimized, keyword rich and relevant page title is one of the key on-page SEO elements on your website. You’re not likely to rank for a particular keyword phrase if it’s not found in the title tag on that page. Pay attention also to the meta-description tag. This snippet of text that shows up beneath your search engine listing should be written in tight, concise, compelling copy with a call to action that entices searchers to click on your link.

The world of search engine optimization is always changing. If you are a website owner you’ve got no choice but to stay abreast of the changes so that your business will continue to grow and flourish.

Some of you might be saying that you’ve heard these things before, but are you implementing them on your site? Sometimes the simplest solution can generate unexpected results, but you’ve got to take the time to put the solution into practice.

Before you make the above-mentioned changes to your website, do a quick snapshot analytics report so that you can review it 30 days and then 60 days after you make the changes and see if they generated some positive results for you.

For more valuable SEO tips and other strategies for building and growing your online business, visit http://www.mcreasite.com/blog today.

Get paid to share your links!

If your website caters to a local clientele then you are definitely leaving money on the table if you have not optimized your Google places listing. Let’s face it. When people in your local area are searching for what you have to offer, such as, “Springfield cupcakes,” you want your business to pop up as close to the top of the listings as possible. Your Google Places listing is free. It comes with a detailed map of your location, a satellite and sometimes even a street level view of your business location, so why not take advantage of it?

One of the other benefits of optimizing your Google Places listing is that it helps boost your visibility on Google, and if you get a good spot on Google places your listing might even end up above the ones that appear in the organic search results.

Add Your Listing to Google Places

Go to, google.com/local/add/businessCenter and add or claim your new listing. Follow the steps to verify your listing.

Optimize your Google Places Listing:

• Be sure to fill out your business profile completely. Be sure to use lots of relevant keywords without spamming the page. Use plenty of appropriate geo-local keywords such as your city name, zip code, neighborhood name + your keyword, and your business category + location such as: “cupcakes, Springfield.”

• Get as many reviews as you can. Ask your favorite customers to visit your listing and leave a review and rating. The more reviews and ratings you get the higher your listing will appear in local search results. Avoid posting a bunch of reviews at once as this does not really look natural. Add them one or two at a time slowly over time.

• List your business in other local online business directories as well, and link these to your Google places listing to help boost your profile.

• You can add up to ten photos and five videos to your page. You can add coupons and even use a QR code.

Another strategy for optimizing your listing is to take a peek at the top three of your local competitors that are above you in the listings. View their profile and see what they are doing. Take note of them and do the same things on your profile and watch your profile move up in the local search engine results.

But one of the most important things that you can do to grab more notice both by your potential customers and by the search engines is to get listed in as many online directories as possible such as Yelp.com, CitySearch.com, Yahoo! Local, and SuperPages.com to name just a few of the dozens of directory sites where you can get a local listing.

Optimizing your Google places listing makes it simple for your customers to find you, it will also send lots of targeted traffic to your website, and help boost your website’s SEO at the same time.

Optimizing your Google places listing is just one way to generate traffic and interest to your website and local business. For more tips on how to grow your business online, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog today.