Webmaster World Blog

Maybe the single most important part of running an affiliate website is understanding how people find your site and how to make your site stick out among the billion or so other sites on the Internet.

If you’ve been using the Internet for more than an hour or two, chances are you know what a search engine is. Websites like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com have developed into multi-billion dollar corporations in the last ten years.

Using search engines is extremely simple. You just go to the site, type in what you want to find and click enter. But how can you make sure that your site will be found? As it turns out, it’s all about the keywords. That is also and a contest field – a kind of this is the seocontest2008.

When a site like Google or Yahoo searches the Internet to come up with results from a web query, it takes the number of keywords on a site into consideration. It also takes particular keywords or phrases into account, too. If someone is doing a search for “Book about Rolling Stones,” a site that has that phrase or a phrase similar to it 10 times is going to come up higher than a site that only mentions it once. That’s why its so important to incorporate keyword text into your web content so that when someone does a search for, say, “Oolong Tea from China” and that just happens to be what your site sells, your site comes up high on the list, not buried on the bottom.

The trick is to incorporate these keywords or keyword phrases into your web content, and still have your content make sense – this is one of the main thing is winning the seocontest2008. This is a super-tricky obstacle to get around. The best advice I can give is to simply read around and see what other affiliate marketing sites have done. Remember, your content is a huge part of your site. If people don’t stay on your site for a minute or two reading your content, they will never, ever click on any links you have and buy any products you’re selling. You must find the balance between a heavy use of keywords and well-written text.

Knowing how to use search engines is a big part of affiliate marketing. You can have the best content, the most timely links and the best product in the world and you won’t do a lick of business unless people can find you. Learning the art of incorporating keyword text into your affiliate website may seem tough, but it’s the difference between making a few bucks here and there and making it big in affiliate marketing.

One way of increasing your ranking with search engines (which is key to driving visitors to your site) is by the use of links.

The first thing you want to do is place internal links on your own site. In this way, you will drive visitors from one part of the site to another with related information. If you are posting articles, try linking to the previous or next one offered. If you have a series of related articles, be sure to link them together to assist visitors in finding the information that they need. If your site includes a site map, be sure to put a link there as well. The advantage of this course of action is that web crawlers will spider all the pages in your site, not just your main page, which will lead to a higher ranking.

In addition to internal links, you will also want to have some links to other sources of information on the Internet. For this, you would want to choose a handful of sites which you consider to be definitive sources of information on a related topic to yours. Write a brief review of each one and be sure to include why someone would want to visit these particular places online. Do they have articles, quizzes, a discussion forum, or a newsletter? Make note of these features so your readers will have an idea of what to expect before they click on the link. List them as sources of more information, favorite places on the Web, or “online resources”.

You will also want to let other webmasters know you have linked to them and ask them to post a link to your site in return. Send each webmaster a personalized e-mail; sending bulk e-mails simply isn’t appropriate in this case. Introduce yourself as the owner of a newly-launched site and explain that you have taken the opportunity to review their site and were quite impressed with it (otherwise why would you be asking for them to link to you?). You have already added a link to their site to your web page and would appreciate a reciprocal link. Some sites provide a banner or button to use for this purpose. Some individuals “sweeten the deal” by offering other webmasters a free product or service in return for a reciprocal link. You will have to determine whether this is appropriate to your site.

Still another way to use links to increase page ranks is through the use of deep links directories. These directories are unique in that they only list pages other than a site’s main page. If you have a series of articles on your site that are on separate web pages, you may choose to submit each one individually to the directory for inclusion.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05×100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.