Learning to design a great SEO friendly site isn’t a joke as it needs a very orderly and dedicated approach. First of all, you have to do a thorough research on the keywords and key phrases that will be put on both the content, anchor text, header tags, meta tags, and URL, you have to know the right keyword density, CCS style sheets etc. All these things should be done from the point of view of the search engines, but with the target audience in mind. While designing a SEO Friendly website, the basic things that you should avoid include using flashes, using frames within the texts, using excessive media, and use of excess images in the text area.

Keyword research is very important and can never be overemphasized when designing a SEO friendly site. For a start, you have to familiarize yourself with such tools as word tracker and any keyword research tool online, thank God there are many of them which are free to use. Word tracker for example has proven to be a very effective tool in keyword research that will give you very relevant results that will automatically help you capture the attention of your target audience almost instantly. Always know about misspelling search and competition search and you’ll be good to get started with a SEO friendly site.

Keywords placement is of equal importance. First off, always place your researched keywords in different tags. While keyword research is hard and complex in its own right, what is more complex is the correct keyword placement. When you stuff a site with keywords, especially on the header and title tags, you’ll not go any far. Putting keywords on the URL is equally important. In the event that you have lots of words that you want featured on the URL, you can always separate them well using characters such as dashes.

Apart from the website’s logo and other very important symbols, always keep your web content free of images, and if you MUST have images on your site, their placement will also matter a lot hence you have to be reflective, although this is a topic for another day.

Because link building is so important to the healthy development of a website, it is important to understand the nature of useful links versus links that could actually harm your ranking in the search engines.

The first thing to consider – are the sites you want to link to relevant? You want to choose sites that your visitors would find interesting, that rank higher than yours does. If you do a search for recipes for chocolate cake on Google, you will notice that along with the sites that come up is a percentage rate. This rate represents how Google interprets the relevancy of this site to your search. If your site sells baking supplies, then the Chocolate Cake Baking Club would be a relevant site with which to be linked. You may well ask, how does Google know if the sites relate to each other? Well, one of the ways they determine the percentage of relevancy is by the number of other sites that contain your link, or mention of your site.

In order to have your link appear on other sites, you need to set up reciprocal link exchanges which means that you both will link to each other’s sites. It is extremely important that the sites you choose be relevant, as having random links will actually lower your ranking and make your site harder to find. Search engines are designed to be useful to the consumer, so they are designed to elevate sites that are legitimate and share useful and relevant links. Not every link exchange is a good idea, so keep that in mind.

The other factors that are considered by search engines are whether the links have been on your site for a while, or are they all new. The search engines will give you better ranking for developing over time and showing a slow and natural growth, than they will if you appear with links intact overnight, or have frequently changing and disappearing links.

It is important to note, that some search engines will not even give your site a rank at all until it has existed for more than 6 months. This is a great time, however, to focus on building your relevant links to help promote your site effectively when the site is ready to be ranked. The links that have been created during that time will be recognized as having had time on your site and this will help your ranking.

Taking these tips to heart when attempting to optimize your site, will make a significant difference in the ranking and traffic your site receives.

White Hat SEO Methods

This method entirely relies on a site that adheres to all the guidelines, rules and regulations set by the search engines, has well selected keywords, and a good strategy of gaining views steadily on a long term basis through quality content and quality external links. As such, White Hat SEO methods ensure the site content is relevant to the selected key phrases, key words, meta tags, as well as page titles. Because obviously the search engines will black list site pages that are over-stuffed with keywords and key phrases, White Hat SEO methods ensure that the words are precisely chosen and used.

Gray Hat SEO Methods

This is somehow hard to define because the most common SEO methods fall in either White or Black Hat SEO Methods. Gray Hat SEO methods basically entail methods that search engines don’t approve e.g. second page poaching, the purchase of links, and using content in a deceptive but creative manner. For example, a site can include a client’s review or testimonial which has well calculated words. When such a review is closely scrutinized, one will find that the keywords in the review are the same as those in the site’s main text. The other example that may make your site banned is trading of external links.

Black Hat SEO Methods

Black Hat SEO service providers, otherwise referred to as Black Hatters, are always focused more on getting fast web traffic, regardless of the methods they use – whether the search engines approve of it or not. Black hatters do this with the full knowledge that the search engines will ultimately catch up with them. For webmasters who have outsourced to SEO service providers, they’ll rarely know of the methods used until the search engines black list their sites and page views drop to practically zero. The techniques used are anything not approved by the search engines, whatever the search engines feel isn’t fair game to perk up page rankings. Examples include hiding content and keywords from the site of web visitors while optimizing the keywords and contents for the tools used by search engines to collect information. Many a times, up-to-date articles and topics are secretly fixed in the website, giving totally irrelevant search results.

This explains why various affiliate marketers are always on the lookout for new ways of having the best SEO campaigns possible. Given the fact that affiliates are barraged with so much affiliate marketing information day in day out, getting the right techniques to move up on the results page ain’t always a simple task as many people think. One thing remains true though, getting an effective SEO tactic cannot be accomplished overnight, it has to be built over time in a gradual manner, and after all, even Rome wasn’t built in a day.

It is always good to keep in mind that SEO isn’t just about choosing the best and most pertinent keywords for a website, it also entails keyword placement. The most essential use of keywords is when they are placed in category names, post titles, URL, and texts of permanent links. Of equal importance to note is that search engines today put a lot of value on reducing deceptive SEO behaviors that many marketers today use. Deceiving SEO techniques e.g. Black Hat SEO is a frowned upon technique that can even make a website banned. A perfect example is using hidden texts within the main websites where a webmaster chooses a text color that will blend in the background to obscure the text.

Luckily, there is a way that one can avoid getting banned yet cover all the keywords that you want including the keywords’ common misspellings. The best way to do this is to create a ‘feedback’ and ‘reviews’ page where you can have all the keywords and their misspelled versions as part of the text. In such pages, a few misspellings are allowed hence one doesn’t have to hide anything. Having a lot of relevant content without messing a website is a guaranteed lure for web spiders to come crawling and searching your site. The content has to be as up-to-date as possible if you want the spiders to frequent the site and crawl it more often.

While articles are mostly written for the sole purpose of SEO, always ensure that the content is appropriate and relevant. Select catchy and hot affiliate topics and niche to write about on the articles. Don’t write only for the search engine spiders; write also for human beings because after all, they’re your main target. If you have relevant content on any website, visitors will always come back for more information and guideline. Using the right and acceptable SEO techniques for your site will help you get a great ROI. With the right execution, striking a good rapport with the search engines will not be hard, which will be fruitful in the end making your online affiliate marketing experience the most rewarding.

After this is done, you should start building links that will point directly back towards your website. This is widely thought to be the most crucial factor that determines the rankings on the search engines. While you can opt to pay a professional company to do it for you, it can be costly and since SEO isn’t rocket science, with some little interest and more time, you can learn about it and save yourself a lot of expenses.

How to get links

Web 2.0 Websites

This is a great way to obtain back links by making use of sites that search engines already love. Web 2.0 websites like Hub pages, Squidoo, and Vox have proven to be quite effective. You’ll use the same strategy as you used on writing articles, although here you can place the body text links anywhere that you wish.

Write articles

While this is an old method, it is a guaranteed way of getting back links. It entails writing and submitting articles to directories such as Goarticles, Ezine, and Article Dashboard etc. You’ll find that some directories will allow you to have your links within the body text while others will not, but there will be a resource box at the end where you can put your links. Article writing has two main strategies:-

First off, you can write articles related specifically to your niche or on your favorite topics, put the links in the body text or/and resource box. Secondly, you can write articles on whatever category you may wish without placing links on the body text and pray that web masters pick your articles. If they like your articles and pick them, you’ll have the possibility of having your articles placed on many sites hence giving you lots of back links.

Directories

Submitting your site to directories is another old but guaranteed way of getting links to your site. Ensure you submit them on the right category and even though it may take time because many directories will take even weeks to approve a website, the links once approved will stick, hence your site will greatly benefit from the traffic flowing towards your site.

Links from the same source as of your competitors

Yeah, this too is a great source of links. Which you can easily do by downloading a tool such as SEO for Firefox. When you use such a tool when conducting an online search in Google, you’ll be able to identify all the sources of your competitor’s links

Whatever source of link you choose, or whatever method you wish to use to drive traffic towards your site, it is without a doubt that free traffic from the search engines is a very great long term investment. The simple reputation of having your company website ranking high in a reputable search engine like Google will without a doubt help you build your company’s brand name.