Bill McRea

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.

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.

In many ways the world of SEO has shifted with all of the upheaval caused by the Panda updates and the new demands of the “Google Freshness” update. But even as many things change other things remain the same. An emphasis on the basic principles of SEO   provides a solid foundation over time.

Let’s take a look at our five SEO power tips that will help your website attract a ton of organic search engine traffic in 2012:

1. Actually create your own SEO strategy

Do you have a solid SEO strategy in place that takes into consideration the specifics of your business, industry and niche? Does your plan involve some kind of schedule for the many tasks that need to be completed in order to implement it? It would benefit you greatly to set aside some time and map out a basic SEO strategy for your websites including a list of weekly and monthly tasks.

2. Create a content development strategy

One of the biggest takeaways from the Google Panda updates of last year was the increasing emphasis on the relevance, quality and freshness of the content for your websites. So, even if you’re not going to be the one who will actually be creating the content that you post on your sites, you’ve got to get a handle on what kinds of content you’ll be using, how often you will be posting it, and who will be creating it. Between writing fresh articles, creating videos, writing and submitting press releases, posting in forums and recording audio programs, content creation is a huge part of an information marketing business. Having a strategy will help you to be more efficient and consistent when it comes to creating enough fresh content to keep both the search engines and your audience happy.

3. Use keyword research tools

Do you still do your keyword research by hand? Now is the time to really start putting a lot more emphasis on keyword research. Try out the various keyword research tools and don’t be squeamish about investing in a solid keyword research tool. Finding the right long tail keyword phrases to target can make all of the difference to your seo strategy.

4. Use WordPress

It’s not just that I’m biased because I happen to love WordPress, but I recommend it because it’s got so many SEO features already built in. You can also easily boost the SEO factor of your WordPress blog by adding some free plugins. It’s been proven that search engines love blogs, so why wouldn’t you add one to your static website?

5. Focus on acquiring quality backlinks

Did you catch the emphasis on the word quality when it comes to back links? You want to acquire as many high pr, relevant back links as possible in order to help boost your site’s page rank. This will take either a nice chunk of your time, or you will have to choose a paid backlinking service depending on your budget.

So, there you have five tips to get you started. Map out your plan and then work your plan consistently and you will start to see results.

Using smart SEO strategies is one way to get lots of traffic to your websites. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today where you will discover many more tips for growing your online business.

You spend a lot of time creating fresh content and managing your website or blog, but did you know that by overlooking a very basic step you could be losing out on organic search engine traffic? Yes, you heard that right. SEO does not have to be overly complicated. While the majority of your site’s page rank will be determined by off-page factors such as the number of high quality backlinks to your site, on-page SEO should not be forgotten.

Doing something as simple as creating a sitemap is like putting out a welcome mat to the search engine spiders. Having a sitemap makes it easier for the spiders to crawl your site, find out what you have to offer and send traffic to the proper pages. Let’s take a look at how easy it is to create a sitemap.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is basically just a page that contains a list of all of the pages on your website along with links to those pages.

Sitemaps are a helpful tool for your human visitors who will be able to quickly spot the page they need and go to it.

How does a sitemap help improve my site’s SEO?

Sitemaps makes the job of the search engines easier when they stop by to index your pages. Using a sitemap ensures that the search engines visit all of the pages on your site. This helps your website and its content get found more quickly and easily by your target audience.

How do I create a sitemap for my website?

If you have a small website (5 or fewer pages) you can quickly create a sitemap by hand.

•  Use the same page template for your sitemap that you are using for the other pages on your site.
•  Link titles on your sitemap should contain keyword anchor text.
•  Below each page link, include 20 or so words of text from that page, to give some context for both search engines and human visitors.

Link to your sitemap from your website’s home page so that the search engine spiders can find it and go from there to crawl all of the pages that you want them to crawl.

If you have a website with too many pages to create a sitemap by hand for, there are some free software solutions that you can try. If you’re running a WordPress blog, there’s a handy plugin that will create a sitemap for you.

Google XML Sitemaps

The description says, “This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.” One cool thing about this plugin is that it also notifies the major search engines every time you create new pages.

Xml-sitemaps.com

For those who are not using WordPress blogs, this free, XML sitemap generator build an XML sitemap that can be submitted to the major search engines, a text version containing a list of all of your pages, and an HTML version so that your human visitor can find what they are looking for on your site quickly and easily.

Having a valid sitemap is a win-win. You make both your human visitors, and your search engine spider visitors happy and coming back to your site, which is always a good thing.

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

When you consider the fact that more people now access the Internet using a mobile phone than with a desktop or laptop computer, you begin to understand just how much money you are leaving on the table when your website is not optimized for mobile.  Have you ever tried to access your own website from your mobile phone? Do you have to enlarge the image so that you can actually read the tiny text? If a visitor wants to enter information into a field, do they have to re-size it so that they can actually see the box they are typing into?

Admittedly, mobile is challenging because things are moving so quickly, and most business owners are not sure which way to go.  In this article we will look at ways that you can optimize your current website for mobile visitors. You’ll get tips on how to decide which content to focus on when you develop your mobile website, and you’ll be able to get a glimpse of what your website looks like right now on a variety of mobile platforms before you change a thing.

How many of your current visitors are viewing your site using a mobile device?

If you use Google Analytics, you can go into your profile within the, ‘Advanced Segment,’ and create a new segment and call it “mobile.” Under the ‘Ad content’ dropdown, select ‘Browser,’ under ‘Containing,’ select ‘Exactly matching,’ and in the field type, “mobile.” Now the next time you run your analytics report you can see how many visitors are accessing your site from a mobile device, and what pages they are landing on. This will help you to optimize those pages.

How does your website look when viewed on a mobile phone?

Try a mobile device emulator so that you can get a feel for what your visitors are seeing when they land on your website. Here are two mobile emulators that you can use for free without the need to sign up as a developer:

•  springbox.com/mobilizer/
•  ready.mobi

Can visitors easily find your contact info?

Since 95% of searches made on mobile devices are for a local resource, if you have a physical location you should make sure that your contact information such as your phone numbers, address (including zip code and the name of your neighborhood or part of town, email address, and a link to your Google Places page with a map and driving directions to your place of business.

Can you be found on social media sites?

Make sure that you have a Facebook business page that contains all of your contact info, address, directions, product links, etc. More people access Facebook using their mobile devices than they access it using their computers. Have links to local review sites such as yelp.com and Angie’s list.

While you are in the process of working out your mobile marketing strategy, make sure that the website you have now can be viewed and accessed by your clientele using their favorite mobile devices.

Mobile marketing represents what’s hot and trending right now in the world of online marketing. For more tips and strategies for growing your business online, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.