SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” which is practically the foundation of any online marketing or website visibility campaign. You can run all the pop-up, pop-in, and pop-under ads you want, you can contract with Google and all the other major internet advertisers, and you can create all the clickbait articles and slideshows you want, but the one thing that delivers the best results more often than anything else is search engine optimization.
How Search Engines Work
The internet is a vast place, and it’s getting bigger by the second. By our best estimates, the current amount of online data is best measured in exabytes, which is three prefixes (1,000,000,000 times) beyond gigabyte. Even the world’s most powerful and popular search engine, Google, has only indexed a few hundred terabytes of data, each of which equals 1,024 gigabytes.
However, even Google’s small fraction represents a frightening amount of information, and the job of a search engine is to sift through it all to find the websites that its users are looking for. It does this by using an algorithm that looks for a lot of different factors. Relevant words are important, but so is a website’s popularity, how often it updates, how many other sites link to it, and much more. By combining and weighing all these factors, a search engine can present the most useful sites at the top of its list.
How Search Engine Optimization Works
By using SEO techniques on your website, you can improve your search rankings and thus bring in more people who are interested in what you have to offer. The goal is to get onto the first page for at least a few of the common searches that lead to sites like yours, and there are plenty of ways to get a search engine’s attention.
For instance, in order to keep up the appearance of constant updates, most corporate websites will start a blog. A blog is a particularly good idea for businesses that don’t change their products or their prices frequently, but even sites with constantly rotating inventories can get a few more visitors if they manage to publish an article that becomes popular.
Another great way to improve a website’s SEO is by contacting other, similar sites and asking them to add links to your site. Depending on the site and the subject matter, the other site might turn you down cold so you can’t compete with them, or it might add your link to their list with no questions asked. Many websites will ask for a quid pro quo, a link on your site that leads back to theirs.
How Search Engine Optimization Doesn’t Work
There’s a persistent idea among SEO writers that says that it’s faster, easier, and cheaper to cheat, to take advantage of the search engine’s algorithm to score a higher ranking than they’d otherwise deserve. However, search engines keep closing these loopholes and the public keeps growing wise to this manipulation, and so cheating (also known as black hat SEO) isn’t as effective as you’d think.
Just as one classic example, a search engine considers the keywords you write for each webpage. However, if you fill your page about trout with every spelling and misspelling of the words “fish” and “trout,” a modern search engine will actually deduct points instead of add them. This is because low-quality sites have been using this tactic for years to get people to click on them.
One other thing you need for proper search engine optimization is content that’s worth reading, watching, or listening to. Some websites live or die by the quality of their writing, including most affiliate marketing sites that attract visitors and then direct them towards their affiliated company’s products. If an affiliated website doesn’t have good, helpful writing, then it won’t matter what its search engine rank is because no one will stick around long enough to see the ads.
Here at Affiliate Marketer Training, we provide all the advice affiliate marketers need to know about gathering viewers with search engine optimization, advertising, and social media and how to keep them with smart writing, clear website design, and consistent updates. This site is owned and contributed to by already successful affiliate marketers, and we don’t just describe the techniques that worked for us – we also put them into practice.