difference between success and failure for your fledgling affiliate marketing
business. What’s worse, filling in the right boxes with wrong details can
burry your completely competent site under inferior results to ensure that
practically no one will ever be able to find it?
While SEO is a hotly debated subject, the good news is that you can get by
without hiring an expert if you are willing to do the leg work yourself and
keep up with it in the long-term. While this won’t have you leading the pack,
it will at least keep you in the running. When it comes to getting started
improving your SEO by yourself, the biggest cost is going to come in terms
of the time commitment that you put forth in improving your website’s SEO.
The following tips will help you get started on the right foot.
Choosing keywords
When it comes to choosing the best keywords for your website, your first
thoughts are going to be words that will see the greatest number of hits
overall. Truly successful keywords go beyond this, however, and reflect how
a website or company pictures itself at a fundamental level.
Focus on key phrases: In hopes of finding more useful details, keywords have
grown into key phrases over the years and finding the right one for you is
crucial to your long-term success. While it can be easy to overthink the
process, the goal should be to find something that isn’t too broad to be useful
or too narrow to generate reasonable results. For example, if your website
sells nutritionally conscious dog food, then on their own the words food and
dog will not get you where you need to be. Instead, a better choice would be
to choose words that relate to the specialty ingredients your dog foods
contain.
Ideally, you are going to want to choose key phrases that are between 2 and 4
words that relate to your website in the most general terms possible. This
means it is best to do some additional research up front as you may be
surprised to find some common phrases are actually quite unpopular for
whatever reason. The fewer search results you return when testing out these
words, the less popular the phrase is with the public. Again, your goal should
be able to find key phrases that are popular enough to see use without
generating so many hits that it is completely ineffective.
Don’t think of them as a contest: While it can be tempting to go at top search