Affiliate Tools Online

A lot of folks starting out understand the importance of SEO, but think they need to rely on an expert to do it for them. There seems to be this idea that SEO is too complicated to learn and since they things are always changing, why bother learning it at all.

Sound familiar?

If you’re one of these people, I’d like to assure you that you CAN learn SEO, and it’s not as complicated as you may think. Learning to do things yourself will also save you a LOT of money in the long run.

And let’s face it, would you rather pocket your hard earned money or waste it on SEO experts that can’t promise you a #1 ranking (if they’re honest)?

Nobody is more knows your business better than you, nor do they care about it as much. Sure they can implement some of the known SEO strategies, and help boost your search rankings - but they can’t promise you a #1 ranking (if they do, run the other way!).

Most of the strategies used are fairly simple. It’s just a matter of learning of them. But by taking the time to learn them, you’ll be able to keep a better eye on your site - and know what’s working and what’s not.

Running a successful internet business requires a LOT of tweaking. You have to constantly test and tweak new sales copy, design layout, etc. These changes can affect your site’s SEO.

While there are folks out there who will gladly take your money to do this stuff for you - you’ll end up spending thousands of dollars (literally). And you still won’t have a good handle on how your site is doing SEO wise if you don’t learn the strategies yourself. How will you know what these “experts” are telling you is correct?

Today, there are plenty of free and paid resources to learn how to do your own SEO. Some of my favorites include:

• Search Marketing Lab (a private forum devoted to teaching you SEO & SEM and offering personalized help). If you want professional SEO expert advice - this is an EXCELLENT cost-effective value.

• Internet Entrepreneur’s Club (private forum with IMC experts offering personalized help on all things internet marketing related - including SEO).

• SEOMoz (an SEO blog offering both free and paid information)

These are three of the best SEO resources you’ll ever find (and they’re completely trustworthy).

Think you know everything there is to know about SEO? Take the Quiz and see!

One of my favorite SEO sites now offers an online Quiz to test your knowledge of SEO. It contains 75 questions on various SEO topics. Following the quiz, you’ll be placed in one of the categories below based on your score:

• SEO Deity (91% - 100%)
• SEO Master (81% - 90%)
• SEO Professional (71% - 80%)
• SEO Newbie (61% - 70%)
• SEO Novice (50% - 60%)

The quiz is actually quite fun (and educational) - although it does require a bit of thinking for those of use who don’t have various rules memorized.I only scored 85%, but learned some new things - which no doubt would boost my score the next the time through the quiz!

SEO Master - 85%

Are you an SEO Expert?

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (or PPC) is used by internet marketers for a couple of different reasons.

PPC is the quickest way to drive traffic to your web site. When you first create a web site, it can take the search engines a couple of months to find and index it on their own. With Google Adwords, you can have visitors to your web in as little as 15 minutes (assuming your ads are highly targeted and your keywords are not competitive).

PPC virtually eliminates the couple of months waiting period. Getting people to your web site will allow you to test and tweak various elements of your web design and sales copy.

Affiliate marketers often use PPC to drive traffic to a merchant’s site. The affiliate ID is embedded in the ad so they get credit for any sales they’re PPC ad helped generate. In this case, affiliate marketers do not need to have a web page - they can use PPC to advertise and promote products. When somebody clicks on an ad, they are taken directly to a merchant’s web site.

Ranking high in organic search engine listings takes time (and a lot of SEO work). But if you choose less competitive keywords, you can get a first page listing on search engines thanks to your PPC ad. The more people that see your PPC ad, the better chance you have of getting qualified buyers to your site!

As you can see, PPC offers many advantages to the internet and affiliate marketer. It’s necessary skill for serious internet marketers.

Need help learning PPC? Check out these resources …

Google Cash eBook (by Chris Carpenter)

The Definitive Adwords Guide (by Perry Marshall)

Adwords Coaching by Perry Marshall

When it comes to naming web pages, people tend to fall in to one of two categories. They’ll either use one word to keep things short and simple or they’ll try to name a page based on SEO tactics.

There are some advantages to keeping some SEO strategies in mind when naming your web pages. However, it’s also a good idea to remember that some of the older rules no longer apply.

Here are some tips to help you name your web pages.

1. When naming pages like your “about”, “contact”, and “privacy”, “affiliate”, “FAQs”, etc., it’s okay to use one word. These are pages that every web site needs, but it doesn’t matter if folks can find them naturally through search engines.

2. Pages that you want people to find through search engines or PPC, should contain a keyword for that page. This rule will really help your potential visitors see the relevancy of your page to their search.

3. If using more than one word, you should keep try and keep your page names to 203 words (4 max). Shorter names are easier to read and remember. There’s also less of a chance entire URL being truncated.

4. IMC’s SEO expert recently mentioned on her blog that using hyphens instead of underscores when naming your web pages no longer gives you an SEO advantage.

Until the recent change, the hyphen used to be treated like a “space” between words (which allowed the search engines to read separate words when looking at your page name, as opposed to scrunching them all up into one word). They used to ignore underscores completely (treating your page name as one long word).

But even though is no longer an SEO advantage to using hyphens when naming web pages, there is still an advantage for your readers!

If you share a hyperlink to your page (via email, or in a document), the underscore isn’t visible due to the blue underline that appears on hyperlinks. Savvy web users will know there’s an underscore in the page name (the space between words is a dead give away) - but many novice users will not.

Many computer users don’t build web sites - so they don’t know you can’t have a space between words. So if they see what appears to be a space, many of these folks assume it is one (and then they’re frustrated when they can’t find the web page by typing in the name exactly like it appears).

Hyphens are clearly visible between words. Everybody can see them and there’s no confusion.

So for this reason, I still recommend using hyphens over underscores when naming web pages. Even though there may be any SEO advantage, it does help your visitors (and that should be a strong enough reason).

The face of blogging has changed significantly over the last year or two. No longer are bloggers just teenagers or people wishing to voice their strong opinions on various topics. Today, blog are are a useful business tool.

Blogging can help the internet marketer achieve several goals including,

• Boost search engine rankings
• Drive more traffic to your web and sales page
• Build a content rich site that brings your readers back for more
• Build keyword rich pages
• Increase inbound links to site as well as internal deep links
• Allow you to interact with your visitors & customers
• Increase profits

As you can see, there are a lot of great benefits to blogging. Let’s take a closer look at how they work.

In order to drive people to your web site or blog, you need to provide content their looking for. In order to figure out what information people are looking for, you need to do keyword research (otherwise, you’re just guessing).

Optimizing web pages for keywords works best if you limit a page to one or two keywords (otherwise search engines, and often people, have trouble determining what your page is really about).

So if you optimize each blog post for a keyword, not only will search engines understand that your post is about, you’ll be giving people exactly what they want (without watering it down).

Less competitive keywords will give you a great chance of ranking high in the search engines. The more pages you can get high rankings for, the better your overall ranking will be - and the higher your search engine ranking, the easier it will be for folks to find your site (which means more traffic).

The more quality inbound links you have to your site, the higher your Google Page Rank will be. The best way to get quality inbound links is to provide valuable content, so that others will want to link to it naturally.

The more inbound links you have, the more important your site is viewed. Again, these things lead to higher search engine rankings and therefore more traffic.

Blogs make it very easy to interact with your readers. You can ask them questions, solicit their feedback and respond through the comment system. You can also comment on other people’s blogs. These things help build your credibility as an expert in your field.

You can boost your income by driving people to your sales page or by incorporating affiliate links into your posts (as long as they’re relevant to the post).

Blogging is a valuable SEO tool today. It’s valuable in fact, that IMC has produced a course on blogging in order to help you get the most from it. It’s called, Blogging for Dollars and will show you how to set up a blog and use it to make money.

And I can tell you from personal experience - blogging works!

SEM is stand for “Search Engine Marketing” and is one of the trickier terms to understand. That’s because there are many components to SEM.

SEM is primarily concerned with the strategies to used to raise a web site’s visibility for marketing purposes.

SEO (or “Search Engine Optimization”) is one of the strategies employed under SEM. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising is another. Paid advertising (such as banner advertising, etc.) are other strategies employed under SEM.

There are a lot of acronyms associated with internet marketing, and SEO is one of them.

SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization” (you can see why people just say SEO). It’s the process of optimizing your web pages so that search engines know what each page is about. This in turn, can result in a higher listing in the search engines - which in turn can lead to more visitors to your web site.

The primary goal behind SEO is to increase your web sites natural search engine ranking so that more people will be able to find it naturally (which in turn can save you money on advertising).

When creating web pages, it’s important to limit each page to one topic, theme, or keyword. Doing so, helps makes it easier for search engines to understand what each page is about (remember, software algorithms are reading and indexing your pages, not a human being).

If the search engines understand what each page is about, they will be better able to provide relevant content to searchers (which is their primary goal). So SEO not only helps your search engine rankings, it also helps your potential visitors find you easier.

Some of the key elements in good SEO include:

• Knowing your keywords and using them in your web text and Meta Tags (but limit each page to 1 or 2 keywords).

• Creating good title and description Meta Tags which accurately describe your web page (each page should have their own title and description tag).

• Creating a good site map to make it easier for the search engines to navigate your site (and find other relevant content).

• Using keyword tags in your blogs.

SEO is one of the key components of SEM (or “Search Engine Marketing“), which is the overall process of working to raise a web site’s visibility in order to increase the return of investment (or make more money).

There are companies out there that you can hire to handle all your SEO needs. But they are expensive and not one of them can guarantee you a higher search engine ranking (if they do, run the other way).

Optimizing your web page for the search engines, takes time and constant tweaking (which why SEO fees are so high). And search engines will change their algorithms from to time to in an effort to do a better job at providing relevant content and prevent people from trying to manipulate the system.

Because of these things, it’s always best to provide good, valuable content and learn the necessary skills to optimize your own web pages. It’s time consuming, but will produce better results in the long run!