Building niche websites & affiliate marketing

steviegood

InsideInsurance wrote: »

To go back to basis then.....
SEO is what is done to make your site appear higher in the natural search engine results.

Given the importance of doing this people have spent lots of time (and money) trying to work out how the ranking systems. Naturally when you discover how it works you can then do things to try and manipulate the results.

Search engines see some of these things as perfectly reasonable (known as white hat) but other techniques they frown upon and if you are caught doing them your site will be penalised (known as black hat)

A classic black hat technique is to have a bunch of text on your homepage that is nothing but your keywords and as this would be bad for your human visitors you either hide the text using CSS or add code so that the text only shows to the google spidering bot and not to human visitors.

Thanks for the explanation, it was very easy to understand. I always thought i was tech-savvy but some jargon just goes straight over my head!

I'm going to look into SEO. Just rented a book from the library - its over 700 pages long, so i guess there is no easy or quick way to learn the basics. Someone suggested I should use a program called Market Samurai to find out the best keyword search. I'm not sure if you've any experience or if there is another similar tool that would be free.

mrsyardbroom

their mechanisms for ranking etc are all very closely guarded secrets.

They do have google raters who rate pages according to their guidelines. This isn't based on an algorithm but rather on their criteria for a good landing page.

InsideInsurance

steviegood wrote: »

Someone suggested I should use a program called Market Samurai to find out the best keyword search. I'm not sure if you've any experience or if there is another similar tool that would be free.

In terms of offsite SEO and keyword analysis I am more of a strategist than a hands on practical person. When agreeing the approach/ budgets etc I've always handed over to a specialist to do the leg work and just reviewed the results so cannot comment on what software/tools there are to assist. I can get a basic ballpark number using fairly basic techniques and tools which is all that I need for my purposes.

They do have google raters who rate pages according to their guidelines. This isn't based on an algorithm but rather on their criteria for a good landing page.

Generally speaking, pages are rated not sites and so if something is a landing page or product page etc makes no difference.

Vast majority of ranking is done by a complex algorithm which is frequently being updated both for general improvement and also to close down blackhat techniques. At the same time there are some humans who are able make adjustments, now if they do this by changing the algorithm, the info google holds against the page/domain, some results tables or something else, I dont know though suspect number 2

mrsyardbroom

if something is a landing page or product page etc makes no difference.

By landing page I mean the page that the rater is given to rate. It can be anything anywhere on the site.

spiritus

I use Market Samurai but most of it's functionality you can access for free from other sources.

The good thing about it is that is collects all those different sources and presents it to you in one neat package.

It allos you to track your rankings for a certain keyword or see how your competitors are and information on how strong they are.

HOWEVER...

Market Samurai is not the program it was when I bought it 2 years ago. Every time Google changes their algorithm it has an effect on Market Samurai's capacity to collect data and lately Market Samurai is struggling to keep up.

montasura

Just as a side issue, have you also taken account of the costs associated with hosting your website. I only ask because you mentioned youtube videos, Skype etc so I would imagine that in time and if you build a regular visitor base, then a fair amount of bandwidth would be required pushing up the costs of your hosting. This, in turn, my well negate any income you make through affiliate marketing.

This is, of course, working on the assumption that a third party will be hosting your website.

InsideInsurance

Neither Skype nor YouTube would go via your hosting and so make no difference to your bandwidth allowance/ hosting costs

Emuchops

shmeeko69 wrote: »

You seem quite anxious about it all and Google are constantly changing their algorithms in order to try and catch people out.

It is a great business to be involved in, but you have to put the work in at the start and DON'T have any pages which are similar or even duplicate or big G will penalize your site in their search engines.

Regarding the term "Sandboxing", this is usually a trial period for any new site and it's commonly known that, after approximately six months of your site being indexed you will start ranking for your specific keywords if your site is worthy and it's only then, that you'll start to see the benefits of natural traffic.

The best thing to do is give it a try and have a plan of action in place which requires you to do X amount of hours each day/week/month and decide if you want to be a webmaster or an affiliate.

All the best

Mark

Mark/Smeeko69-do you know if the 'sandboxing' thing would apply to new blogs too? Slightly off topic but you sound like you know about these things.
Thanks

InsideInsurance

Sandboxing is an SEO bogey man and like most bogey men some believe it exists and others don't.

If it exists then it is believe to exist equally for all sites irrespective of what type of site it is.

Personally I have never seen true evidence for it and have seen sites rank relatively well within their first week of launch. I say relatively as it is naturally relative to the level of competition there is for the keywords in question. You are not going to launch a site on "insurance" and expect it to be on page 1 in the first week when you are up against a hundred companies each with a multimillion pound SEO budget thats been running for years. That isnt sandboxing thats simply practicalities.

Emuchops

Thankyou II