Every affiliate marketing account offers different types of commissions,  order sizes, and may have specific payment thresholds .. so be sure to do your homework

Source: Affiliate Marketing Review Report Card by AceAffiliates.com

After reading a couple of posts on this site and seeing just how worked up people are getting over the whole ‘no-follow’ link business. I thought I would chuck my thoughts into the mixer and try to clear up a few things.

A History

Firstly, the no-follow attribute (it’s not a tag) on links was first introduced back in 2005 by the Big G. They said that if you add rel=”nofollow” to your links then those links “won’t get any credit when we rank websites”. MSN and Yahoo! Quickly jumped onboard and said they would support the new initiative as well.

Even back then there was a level of mis-trust surrounding Google, and so webmasters and SEOs took it upon themselves to test this new ‘no-follow’ theory. Some found that the no-follow attribute did indeed work and sites did not get any power when linked to with no-follow links. Others have since claimed that power is still passed through no-follow links.

There was even speculation over whether Google actually crawled and indexed pages that had only been linked to using no-follow links. Unfortunately, there has never (to the best of knowledge) been extensive research conducted on this topic and certainly no categorical evidence on the matter published on highly-trustworthy sites. Instead, we have been left with much hearsay and speculation about whether no-follow actually works or not.

However, what we have got are indications and hints from the search engines that we can use to piece together some idea of the truth.

Common Sense

Firstly, we can use logic to determine what is in the best interests of the search engines. Spam is a massive problem for them and we know that websites sometimes need to link out to other sites that they don’t necessarily want to pass power to. For example, they might want to warn about a spammy or scammy website, but at the same time not help it rank. Also, many large websites cannot look after every link on the site and so are open to link spam. With this in mind it makes perfect sense for search engines to introduce a method for maintaining clean hyperlinks, but not ‘voting’ for the site being linked to. I’ll also add to this argument that in my experience I have never seen no-follow links pass any power that has gone on to help rankings.

Double-Bluff

There is another argument as well that comes about from Google shooting itself in the foot somewhat. By introducing the no-follow attribute, webmasters and SEOs soon realised that they could use these links to craft the internal power of their sites to make some of their pages more powerful than others (PageRank sculpting). Additionally, some sites starting adopting Black Hole SEO techniques, not linking out to any websites without using no-follow links, thus maintaining all link juice power in the site. The link juice does not leak out, but instead gets recycled internally and arguable increases exponentially, leading to very power websites.

Google obviously did not like the abusing of their very clever link attribute and so Matt Cutts wrote a post about how Google had changed the algorithm so no-follow internal links now wasted link juice. He claimed although no power was passed through them, no-follow links were still including in how many times the power of a page was divided between the links. Incidentally I don’t believe a word of this, but that doesn’t matter, what is more important is what it implied. This move cemented for me that fact that no-follow links do not pass power, otherwise Google would not have bothered telling website owners not to use it.

Crawl & Index?

In terms of whether search engines crawl and index pages that have nothing but no-follow links pointing to them, there are unfortunately not as many clues. However, it is my personally opinion that it does follow those links as Google very nosey and tends to want to know what is going on in every corner of the web. These pages rarely rank though as they have no power to move them up the SERPS. Again, from experience I have seen pages cached that having nothing but no-follow links. Even Google is not definitive on the matter saying “In general, we don’t follow them”, which obviously means that they can and do.

In semi-conclusion then: no-follow links do not pass power, but are crawled and sometimes indexed by Google. I cannot really speak for other the other search engines, but then I’m not sure I care about them.

Duncan is a search specialist who represents a luxury cruises company. Duncan often blogs about internet marking and SEO techniques of past, present and future.

Sure it’s great looking, but who can tell if they can’t find it?

And how about your web site? Are you working hard hard on your web site SEO (search engine optimization) to improve your search engine rankings and conversions, but doing that manually yourself turns out to be too confusing?

There are many online SEO (search engine optimization) applications which can help you analyze and measure your web site’s rankings and conversions potential. Even if nobody knows the exact algorithms that the search engines use, they still can be very helpful if you are not afraid to use your intelligence and common sense.

If you would do a search with search engines to find such kind of applications, which keyphrase would you type in the search engines search box to find them? Please help giving your vote in the poll below.

Web design can be challenging.  For me, the challenge is in not making things too complex and in keeping things simple and clean, which makes the site more user-friendly and a more pleasant experience for visitors.  Here are a few steps to make sure your site is effectively helping you achieve your objectives, while remaining easy to use for your visitors.

Step 1: Keep it simple.

I think it’s tempting, or maybe just our first impulse, to over-complicate things.  Website design is not exempt from that tendency, but if you want to build a site that’s effective (that helps you achieve your goals), simplicity is key.  What is simplicity in web design?  It’s sticking with the basics.  It’s not worrying about being cool or edgy or unique.  I know, we want our websites to stand out, but even though intuitively we might think the opposite is true, simplicity in design, layout, and functionality actually will make them stand out from the crowd.

Step 2: Be painfully obvious.

Another common tendency is to want to name pages, especially navigation links, in a unique way.  Nothing will frustrate your site visitors (or cause them to click away from your site to another more user-friendly one) than making them have to think too much.  If they want to contact you, they’re going to look for the “Contact” link.  If they want to find out more about your products or services, they’re going to look for your “Products and Services” link.  If they want to find out more about you or your company, they’re going to look for your “About” link.  That’s it.  It’s that simple.  Name your pages in an unexpected way will only cause confusion in your site visitors.  It’s going to seem painfully obvious and even boring to you, sure, but you have to ask yourself if you’d prefer to be hip or edgy or if you want your site to be usable and to work for you to meet your objectives.

Important Thing to Note: I’m talking about navigation links here, not the actual full page names.  Those are two separate things.  The links in your navigation should be clear and obvious, but your full page names should be descriptive for search engine optimization purposes.
Step 3: Think in an outline.

Before you dive into building pages and adding content to your site, stop.  Stop and think, “Will this get lost?  Am I building circles and mazes and a sea of pages that lack clear hierarchy?”  You want to think in terms of an obvious outline.

• Home
• About

• • Our Mission
  • Our Team

• • • CEO/Founder

• Services
• Blog
• Contact

Plan out your site in a clear outline.  Do your planning on paper first so that you see the clarity (or lack of) in the hierarchy of your site.  If you dive in and immediately get to work on the home page (our first impulse), you’ll end up with a jumbled mess that’s confusing, both to you and to your site visitors.

Step 4: Don’t overcrowd or clutter.

Sometimes you have to put all the content (images, text/copy, lists, etc.) that you hope to have on a page up before you can see how it’s going to stack up visually.  It’s kind of like arranging a room in your house.  You can’t know how you’re going to position the furniture or how cluttered the room will ultimately feel until you try to put everything into the room.  Once you have everything in there, you can see, “No, it’s too cluttered in here.  I can’t even walk without bumping into things.  Something’s gotta go.”  The same is true with your web pages.  Less is generally more.  You want empty space and room to move around.  Once you have all the content up, expect to cut it by at least 15%.  You want to have enough visual breathing space for the most important things to stand out, and you definitely don’t want to overwhelm your visitors.

Many times, our naturally impulse is to lean toward complexity, and that can be counter-productive in web design.  If you want your site to help you achieve your end goals, you have to keep things simple and usable for your site visitors.

Amber Singleton Riviere is the founder of Upstart Smart, a resource for small business owners, as well as the Rock Your Genius radio show, which focuses on small business and entrepreneurship.  She also runs the Give Back Project, a web design and marketing firm, and writes for websites like Web Worker Daily on topics relevant to small business owners.  You can find out about all of Amber’s work by visiting AmberSingleton.com .

External hyperlinks are great for SEO, but it’s the internal variety that you can manipulate to your heart’s content and optimise for search engines. Given this level of control you have over your own links, are you sure they are working as hard as they can be for you? If they aren’t complying to the advice below, then chances are they are slacking and need to be given 100 push-ups right now!

Keywords in Anchor Text

This might seem like an obvious one for some people, but you would be amazed just how many sites don’t think to include keywords in their internal links. This one of the major factors that search engines look at when trying to determine what a page is all about, so as long as you are not compromising on usability, you should get those keywords in your links. For example, let’s say you have a site offering corporate hospitality that covers all the major sporting events. Rather than link to the Superbowl page with the text “Superbowl”, it would probably be much better for you to use the term “Superbowl hospitality”, or “Superbowl corporate hospitality”. Don’t go crazy though and starting linking to your homepage using the term “corporate hospitality events” or “premium client entertaining” etc, as this will just start to confuse users.

Important Links Moved Up The Source Order

Many people don’t think to move their most important internal links up the order in the source code. Search engines tend to crawl the links at the top of the page first, so it stands to reason that the first elements should be the most important ones. Let’s say for example your category page links appear in the source code below your ‘about us’, ‘contact us’, ‘RSS’, ‘settings’ links etc. Whist these may be important to users, it is unlikely you want to pass power to these pages for ranking purposes and so you can move them down the source order. There is no need to change the look of the page, just use JavaScript to move elements about. Matt Cutts even hints at the fact links found in different parts of a page might be treated differently by Google:

Text Links Above Images

Tying into the idea above, when linking out to the same place twice or more from a single page, always put your most valuable link first in the source order, as this will be one search engines pay attention to. By ‘most valuable’ I mean most search engine friendly, which is often a key-worded text link. This is most often a problem for ecommerce sites as displayed by the product screen shot below.

Here there are 3 links all going to the same product page. First is the image link, second the product title link and third the price also links to the product page. On this occasion the image link appears first in the source code and is likely to be the one that search engines crawl. However, we really want search engines to look at the keywords in the product title text link, so it would be more beneficial to move this above the image link in the source code.

Links Limited to Around 100 Per Page

It is has been stated in the Google Webmaster guidelines for a long time now that you should limited the amount of links (internal or external) to around 100 per page. The reasoning for this suggestion has changed a little however since it first appeared in the guidelines. Originally, Google’s crawlers could only index around 100k of a webpage, which they roughly equated would be around 100 links. However, as Google has become more power they can index far greater amounts of data.

The argument they give for still including the 100 link rule in their suggestions is a usability one. They say that people don’t like pages full of links and it is more ‘user-friendly’ to break the links up into separate pages. There is however clear SEO benefits to keeping the number relatively low as otherwise the link power of the page will be diluted too much. Roughly speaking, the link juice of a page gets divided by the number of links heading out from it. Therefore, if you have 1000 links on page, each of those linked to pages will receive very little (relative) power indeed. It is usually advisable to try and spread links over more pages or better yet categorise them onto strong, stand-alone pages to improve user and search engine friendliness.

Duncan is an online marketing expert at a Sussex-based SEO company. He blogs about topics from social media to link building and content optimisation.

I like to think that I have become a more passive and accepting internet user over the years. Perhaps this is because I no longer have to wait ten minutes to upload an image and web pages load as fast as my brain works (sometimes even faster). I have not however lost my contempt for people trying to get one over on me or make me do things I don’t want to do.

I remember back in the day, the first time I opened a .exe file from a friendly email, only to get a huge phone bill through the post a couple of weeks later saying my computer had been ‘dialling’ out to Delhi every five minutes for the last fortnight. I was soon after introduced to virus and malware protection and coupled with my cable internet connection I again felt safe to roam the streets of the information super highway once again. I think I even reached a state of browsing zen for a couple of days, until I found my first pop-up that is.

These intensely infuriating, invasive creations of Beelzebub get in the way of what I am trying to do and serve only to make me hate the website I am on and the product or service being advertised more than I hate my mother-in-law. I do have pop-up blockers but the tenacious critters still frequently find their way through. For me they fly right in the face (literarily) of what the internet and usability is all about. When I visit a website I expect every part of it to earn its place in my consciousness, and if it doesn’t, then either it is not important or the site has not been built properly. If I want to go to the ‘kitchen accessories’ section of the website I will look around for a link that I interpret to be the right path and follow it, likewise with the DVD and underwear sections respectively. I do not want to be told however that “I MUST CHECK THE BOOK SECTION NOW!!” Or “VISIT THIS VIAGRA SITE….NOW!”

Pop-up ads are not good for website image and do not work for advertisers. But don’t just take my word for it; there are Many reports that show pop-ups are just about the worst thing you can get involved with. There are so many alternative methods for merchants to market their website, and myriad different options that help site owners to earn a few extra bucks. There is no need to encourage people to imbed their fists in their computer screens by popping up, under, sideways or any other way for that matter.

Duncan is an SEO and online marketing expert who represents a Las Vegas holidays company. He believes there are much better ways to promote websites than forcing them down people’s throats.

If you have been in the internet marketing game for any length of time, chances are that you have run up against a highly-ranked Wikipedia page in your search vertical. SEO is no exception.

Not only does Wikipedia have the first two spots, but it also has a “Show more results from the wiki” underneath its listing. Of course, Wikipedia has major domain authority with 82 million inbound links, and it even outranks Google’s own SEO page.

Compared to some of the other pages in the search result, the two Wikipedia pages featured have less external backlinks. As a matter of fact, six of the other listings on the first page have many more inbound links to their pages. Also, listings on the second page of search results have many more inbound links.

It would be practically impossible to replicate Wikipedia’s domain authority. However, what is not difficult to replicate is how Wikipedia wields its authority.  Within every page on Wikipedia where “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” is mentioned, it links to its own internal page about the subject.

A site search of Wikipedia (site: Wikipedia.org search engine optimization) produces 62,800 results. Many of these pages link to our top two search results.

Wikipedia does not rely on a huge side or header navigation to give users the ability to drill down to their topic of interest. It only links to itself from within the main content section of the site. Links from the main content sections are much more valuable and pass more authority to the receiving pages than headers or side navigations.

By implementing a similar strategy within your own website or blog, you can boost search rankings without completely depending on offsite link building tactics.

Implementation Tips

The home page is usually the most authoritative page on a site. Linking to important pages from the content section will boost their rankings. Blogs naturally do this with the most recent posts, but most static sites do not use this tactic.

Hide important header and sidebar links from the search engines on the home page of a site with javascript or an iframe since only one link and anchor text will be counted. Now, link to the important pages of your site from inside of the main copy and unlock all of the real authority that your homepage carries.

Automation is obviously the easiest way to use this tactic unless you have millions of users ready to edit your content. I use a plugin that automatically links to a page of my choice every time a keyword is used in the text of my blog. It’s much easier than doing it manually.

Some have said that one drawback to using this tactic is that pages become diluted and users find the links confusing, and may jump out of a conversion funnel. Testing should be done on a case by case scenario; however, it does not seem to have hurt Wikipedia’s user base.

Jason Capshaw is founder of an Atlanta Web Design and SEO services company. He lives with his wife and two children in Hampton, GA.

I recently signed up to a few business and SEO forums and was amazed at what people still recommend.

As there are so many people offering outdated or wrong tips and tricks on how to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns, I thought I’d let you know of some of the biggest myths around.

Search engines are always changing their algorithms, and over the past decade things have changed dramatically. Due to complexity of this industry, and the rapid changes, this has led to the many believed SEO myths which I have listed below.

1) Submit your websites to search engines

I still hear about people submitting their website to Google and other search engines to get indexed and to “rank higher” - this just simply isn’t true anymore. It has been at least 5 years since this technique has been necessary and all you need to do is obtain a few backlinks and make sure your not blocking robots from crawling your website.

2) Keyword densities

There are still hundreds and hundreds (probably thousands) of websites that either have lots of keywords spammed at the bottom of their website or within their content. This will do more harm than good, and it’s almost a certainty that you will get penalised and dropped from the results.

So instead of spamming, I recommend that you write great content targeted towards your visitors and to include your chosen keywords naturally (this should not be a problem as you should be targeting relevant keywords to the page).

3) Content length

A while ago, there was a big rumour that went around saying that you need to have a specific number of words in order to get indexed and to increase your position.

Your content should be as long as it needs to be to tell the reader exactly what you need to.

4) Keyword rich domain name

It is still widely believed that if you have keywords within your domain name like www.website-design-nbat-digital.co.uk, that it will improve your rankings. This is not true. Your domain should be short, contain your company name and most importantly be easy to remember.

Note from Ann: I actually still believe in this one
(But not in spamming your domain with keywords though)

5) Meta Tags are no longer relevant

To an extent this is true, but there are still some uses for the META tags. First off, I’d like to say that the keywords tag is no longer used by the main search engines, and therefore does not need including, let alone optimising.

Now that’s out the way, let’s move onto the other main META tag – description. The description tag does not affect rankings in anyway, but it’s a chance for you to try and sell your company and to get a user to click on your website. If you can write a compelling ad that is about your product or service, then you could see your click through rates increase through the roof.

Finally, the title tag. This is the most important tag which highly contributes to your on page optimisation. You should include your main keyword as close to the beginning as you can and of course don’t fill it with unrelated keywords.

6) Pay Per Click will help or hurt your organic rankings

Running a Pay per click (PPC) campaign will not directly affect your organic rankings. However, by occupying two positions for the same keyword you give the user a choice, and while the PPC ad can be good for getting extra traffic, some of the PPC visitors will come from those who previously might have clicked on the organic listing.

7) NoFollow links are a waste of time

Anyone running a link building campaign should acquire both NoFollow and DoFollow links. Not only will this look far more natural but studies suggest that not all search engines pay attention to the NoFollow attribute and in fact value them the same as a DoFollow link.

This article was by Christopher Holland, who is a search engine marketer for nbat Digital - professional web design and search engine optimisation services. Follow us on twitter - @nbatdigital or take a look at our blog.

When doing SEO changes for large scale companies, implementing a proper robot.txt is crucial. I will not go back to the robot.txt definition bla, bla… millions have done that before me.

No, instead, just a simple formula to use whenever the geek inside you has a Robot.txt Writer’s block! So, type “inurl:robots.txt filetype:txt” and, ta-daa! See what the big names are doing.

You will find the robots.txt file from Google, Wikipedia, WebmasterWorld, the White House, Microsoft, W3.org, Facebook, IBM, Amazon, Ebay, New York Times, CNN, YouTube, etc.

Have Geek Fun.

The guest post is by Charly Wargnier, SEO Head at the London digital agency Euston Digital. You can follow their SEO tips and tricks on ED’s Blog, or their Twitter here

A good way to get an edge over your industry competitors is to optimize your website for image search. Many companies focus their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts on their website copy, with little regard for the pictures. Take advantage of their inaction in this area by boosting the search engine visibility of your images, and therefore your website.

Why should you care about image search?

There are several reasons why you should want your site to rank high in image search results for your keywords.

1. First off, a large chunk of people are using image search to find content. According to Alexa Internet, about 10 percent of Google’s visitors go to the site’s image search page. Bing and Yahoo also have their own images searches. Image searchers might be interested in photography, seeking free photos for their blog, or wondering what a particular product looks like. If your photos and surrounding content are relevant, you want these people to find your site. And if your site is useful and captivating, they may become customers or loyal readers.
2. A second reason you should care about image search is that universal searches typically incorporate images into their results. For example, when you type “Beyonce” into Yahoo’s universal search engine, the first page of search results includes Yahoo Image Search results about halfway down the page. The displayed photos are also the first ones that appear in a Yahoo Image Search. Universal search is the default mode for Google and many queries return image results.
3. A third benefit of optimizing your site for image search is it forces you to improve your site’s consistency. In other words, it pushes you to evaluate your niche; adjust your photos, content and keyword so they align with your niche; and get rid of items that lack relevance. This will also boost your overall position in search engine rankings. Search engines like sites with a targeted message.

What first steps should you take to optimize your site for image search?

1. As mentioned above, you want to go through your site and get rid of photos that don’t fit with the overall theme of your website. It might be hard to part with certain pictures, especially if you took them and are proud, but do it anyway. As they say, you must “kill your darlings” for the greater good. In SEO-speak, the greater good is better search engine rankings. If you choose, you can replace the photos you removed with ones that are relevant.
2. Next you should make sure that your photos are relatively large, have high resolutions and contrasts, and have good aspect ratios. Search engines look for quality photos that will look decent in thumbnail form, since that’s the form the photos take on in search results.
3. Next you should make sure that your photo file names sufficiently describe the photos and contain your keywords. Because search engines can’t yet “read” images themselves, you must use other methods to associate your keywords with the images. The file name is one way to do this. Say you sell nonstick Madeleine pans and your keyword phrase is “nonstick Madeleine pans.” It doesn’t take a genius to determine you should label a photo of nonstick Madeleine pans “nonstick-madeleine-pans.jpg.”
4. You can also insert your keywords into the alternative text (alt txt) attribute. If you can, insert the same description you used for the file name, minus the hyphens. So in the case of the nonstick Madeleine pans photo, your alt text would read alt=“nonstick Madeleine pans.” If your site uses the WordPress publishing platform you can download a free plug-in (“SEO Friendly Images”) that automatically updates your images with appropriate alt text attributes. You may also want to put your keywords in the title attribute of your different images, though from a search point of view that matters less than the alt text attribute.
5. Once you’ve optimized the code within your images, consider what’s immediately surrounding your photos. You want to at least see some text that either describes or highly relates to the picture. The text could be a caption, adjacent article or small blurb of information. Feel free to add some text if none exists. Just make sure it contains your keyword phrase. The content’s proximity to your photo will help the search engines identify your photo. It also doesn’t hurt to have your images close to a page headline or subhead containing your keywords.

What additional steps can you take to optimize a site for image search?

1. Make sure that the directory holding your images can be accessed by search engine crawlers. Some webmasters have barred access to this directory so other sites can’t publish their images. The problem with this move is it keeps the images from appearing in image search results. It’s ultimately up to you to decide whether keeping the directory open is worth it, but at least be aware of how keeping it closed can limit your traffic.
2. Re-upload your photos on a regular basis. Search engines prefer photos that have recently been published to photos that have sat around for a while. While technically you may be uploading files that have sat around for a while, the timelier publishing date treats them as fresh.
3. Post your images to photo sharing sites like Flickr. This is a great way to boost traffic to your site. Since Flickr has a lot of search engine authority, its pages tend to rank high in image searches. Pair that with your ability to link your Flickr pages to your website, and your potential for new visitors increases.
4. Let other websites publish your photos. If other websites are interested in publishing your photos to their sites, let them. Just require something in return. You could, for example, request that they promote your site in captions under the photos. The text could state that the photos came from your site, explain your site, and include a link to your site. The more your site is promoted and linked to, the better your search engine rankings will be.
5. Encourage other websites to link to your photos. If you are not comfortable with other websites publishing your photos you can at least encourage them to link to your photos. See if they will include your keywords in their anchor text, another rankings booster.

If you employ these steps, or at least some of them, you will see both your image search and universal search rankings improve. Then you will want to focus on updating your site with highly relevant copy and photos that keep people coming back.

Christine Laubenstein works for WordStream, makers of SEO and pay per click software products.