Mark currently operates in a number of market sectors including gambling, finance and electronics, and has recently sold off a number of his original smaller sites to focus on some of his larger projects and final year at Uni (where he may snatch a first!).  His journey has certainly seen him tread an interesting path.  Last year when attending ex-Dragon Doug Richard’s ‘School for Startups’ seminar, a simple “thank you” to Doug at the end led to an unexpected chain of events that now sees Mark embroiled in a new venture with the Dragon and Sháá Wasmund of Smarta.com.

Outside of studies and business, Mark is a keen traveller and can’t wait for the summer holidays to celebrate his new found freedom with a spot of globe trotting.  He loves football and supports both Falkirk FC and Liverpool FC.  Friends say he is permanently attached to his laptop and is always harping on about new site ideas he has come up with – but they couldn’t care less!

Interesting fact about Mark – his ubiquitous pen name ‘hairycornflakes’ is not an eyebrow disorder, it came about when Mark planned to develop a T-shirt site and asked his mates for suggestions on what to call it!

It gives us great pleasure to welcome Mark to the panel of Affiliate Doctors and we look forward to hearing more from the Hairycornflake!

Welcome on board Mark.

Mark’s Bio

I wouldn’t have got to where I am today if I hadn’t received so much help from various affiliates when I was starting out, so I’m really looking forward to giving something back by helping the newbies of today!

I am lucky enough to be involved in joint ventures with ex-Dragon Doug Richard, Smarta.com’s CEO Sháá Wasmund and also Affiliate Doctor’s very own Steve Kenny!

My main strengths are PPC, SEO and Idea Generation.

Mark’s Introductory Post

“My wordpress site www.proteinshake.org.uk targets the keywords protein shake/s, protein bars, protein powder.  The website converts ok, not great but not bad either.  Some merchants convert around 5% or so, but this varies alot.  Lately the site has only been getting around 13-15 unique visitors per day and it should be performing much better than this.

The site has a fair amount of content and used to rank well for the plural and singular, but roughly 2 months ago it only ranked for the keyword ‘protein shake’.  I feel it should be ranking for alot more terms and in a higher position.

The site has a PR of 2 and a few backlinks.  Very few of the backlinks are for the secondary and third keywords, the majority are for ‘protein shake’ or ‘protein shakes’.”

What I would like to know is why you think the site is under performing so much in the SERPS?

Thank you for taking the time to review my site ”

Here’s what Dan, Kier and Elaine had to say:

Dan

Hi, Richard, how are you?

Congratulations on the site – it’s a great niche and should bring you money for years to come!

Here are 3 quick tips that I think will help you:

TIP ONE: Tighten up your keyword/page targeting

Your homepage title tag right now is:

“Protein Shake | Protein Bars | Protein Shakes | Protein Powder – proteinshake.org.uk”

In other words, you’re trying to get the homepage to rank for:

• Protein Shake
• Protein Shakes
• Protein Bars
• Protein Powder

Instead, I’d reduce your homepage title tag to simply:

“Protein Shake | Protein Shakes – proteinshake.org.uk”

Here’s why I’d do that:

1) You rank really well for ‘Protein Shake’, but you could improve the rank for ‘Protein Shakes’.  Tightening the targeting of the homepage to focus on those 2 terms only could easily bump you up for ‘protein shakes’ (which seems to be the higher volume term).

2) You already have other pages on the site targeting ‘Protein Bars’ & ‘Protein Powder’ respectively.  Therefore, by targeting those with the homepage, you’ve got 2 pages fighting to try and rank for each term.  Stop targeting those terms from the homepage and make sure their individual pages work as landing pages for each term.

TIP TWO: Gather backlinks for your secondary terms

Once you’ve stopped trying to rank the homepage for your secondary terms, you can concentrate on building a few links direct to their pages, with relevant anchor text.  Concentrate on each as if it’s a homepage for the term.

TIP THREE: Use Your Competitors

Without being spammy… if I search for ‘Protein Shakes’, the 3 sites that rank above you right now are all user generated.  It feels like it would be very easy to put together a useful article ‘Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Protein Shakes’, and to post that – quite helpfully and honestly – to each of those forum threads.

It looks like the Yahoo one is now closed, but Google is placing the latest related Yahoo Answers directly underneath it.  It would be very easy to set up a google alert for any topics from Yahoo Answers, Mens Health Forums, or PP Online that mention ‘protein shakes’ and to post a link there if appropriate.

Incidentally – I notice Mens Health Forums also ranks first for ‘protein bars’ and the last post on the thread looks suspiciously like it’s been posted by someone from myprotein.co.uk.

I hope this is useful.

Good luck with it, Richard.

Dan

Kier

Hi Richard.

You’re ranking well for your main keywords but not so much for others.  Identify those that you want to be ranking well for (use Google’s keyword tool to see search volumes) and start working on it.  Add more pages of content optimised for those phrases and build links with them in the anchor text.  You know it’s worked well for your main phrase so repeat the process for others.

As you state yourself your back links are mainly with ‘protein shake’ as the anchor text rather than the others, you just need to rectify this by getting more links and building more relevant content.

Elaine

I’m not certain, but it could be a perceived keyword stuffing penalty and internal linking with the same anchor text – ‘protein’.  Google does seem to have taken a harsher stand against this recently and I’ve had to cull some of my keywords and think of different descriptions and synonyms – sometimes less is more at the moment.

Might be worth a try.

“I have just had my website re-designed and this went live last Friday.  Previous to that I had an off-the-shelf template website from EKM Powershop.  I must now wait for the SEO the designer has done as part of the new website to start working which I know can take several weeks.  However, I already had SEO in place on the previous website, but now when I check certain keywords in Google I’m appearing in some reasonable positions, but when clicking on them it says the web page is not available as obviously this is relating to the old website.  Is there anything that can be done?  It seems a shame to have actually gained some reasonable places by virtue of the SEO I did with EKM to now start at the beginning again.”

Dan

Hi, Janice, how are you?

I don’t think this is really an affiliate question, but here are some notes that I hope will help you.  I’m going to tackle it in 3 parts and I’m also going to assume that your domain name hasn’t changed.

Here are the 3 parts of my answer:

1) What you’d do if you were going to fix this problem
2) Why I wouldn’t bother in your case
3) What you should do instead!

WHAT YOU’D DO IF YOU WERE GOING TO FIX THE PROBLEM

The most straightforward fix would be to tell the search engines firstly that your pages have moved, and secondly where they’ve moved to.  The standard way of doing this is by using a ‘301 redirect’ for each page.

You’d generally do this using either ‘.htaccess’ or, in your case (as your site is database driven, on an apache server, with thousands of pages), a better option would be a ‘mod_rewrite’ rule.  Mod_rewrite is a little module that helps out your server, looking for certain formats of URL & translating them into your preferred format.  For example, if your old format was ‘/category/bathrooms’ and your new format is ‘/bathrooms.html’, you’d set up a rule to look for the word ‘/category…’ before mod_rewrite would work its magic, pass people to the correct pages, and notify everyone that this was a permanent change.  You’d do that rejigging your old style URLs to your new ones.

WHY I WOULDN’T BOTHER IN YOUR CASE

In your case though, it looks like the site only has a couple of links coming into it, and that all of the links are to your homepage anyway.  That’s good news, as it means there’s not a huge advantage to sorting out this problem with dead links (and so you need not worry about the complexities of mod_rewrite).

It’s bad news however, as inbound links are hugely important as far as search engines are concerned, and a lack of inbound links probably means you’re not getting very much traffic from search engines.

WHAT I’D DO INSTEAD OF FIXING YOUR URL ISSUE

Instead, I’d firstly start putting some effort into building links to the site, and secondly I’d fix some other little SEO issues on the site.

I won’t give you any linkbuilding tips here, as there are many ways to do that and it’s far removed from your question.  I do know that one of the other doctors has a very good linkbuilding service over at http://www.contentnow.co.uk/link-building.php though.

My gut instinct is that your new site could do with some big changes.  My gut instinct is often wrong though, so instead here are 3 quick on-site SEO Tips and 2 conversion tips:

1) Fix the Titles on your Category Pages

If you go to this page: http://www.divineinteriorsandgifts.com/Lamps_and_Lighting–c6.html, you’ll see that the page title is “Products: Divine Interiors and Gifts”.  There are hundreds of category pages on your site with that same title, all of which are very unlikely to rank anywhere in Google.  You should ask your web developer to fix those so that they’re relevant to the individual pages (in that case something like “Lamps and Lighting at Divine Interiors” – this could be automated for every page on the site with about 30 minutes work).  While they’re at it, it would be worth you asking them to put your page headings into ‘h1’ tags too.

2) Dot com or Dot co dot uk?

Google has latched onto your .com address, yet in your question you referenced the .co.uk address.  You can fix this by redirecting the.com to the .co.uk. (again your web company should be able to do this very easily).

3) Register with Google’s Webmaster Tools

Google would happily let you know about both of the problems above (and many more) if you signed up to their set of fantastic tools and notifications totally free (‘Google Webmaster Tools).  Visit www.google.com/webmasters/tools/, follow the instructions, and it will give you various bits of info and offer suggestions for improving your site.  A little sidenote is that you’ll probably have to fix the 404 page on your site in order to do this.  Again, your web developer should be able to do that.

4) Conversion Tip: Move your ‘Buy’ buttons

At the moment, the ‘buy’ buttons on your product pages are miles away from the product image, price and stock information.  They’re also in the same colour as all of the other buttons on the site.  I promise you that if you move them nearer the price and change their colour to contrast with the rest of the site, they’ll do better.

5) Conversion Tip: Fix your cart process

When I hit the ‘buy’ button, it’s taking me to a cart page with a link that says ‘Confirm’.  That’s fine, though perhaps ‘Check Out Now’ or something would be better.  But the rest of the cart process is a real struggle to get through.  I’d recommend that you go through this yourself, pretending you’re a first time buyer and then hassle your web people to fix the painful bits.

Semi-finally… there are plenty more little fixes, and bigger fixes, that could help out your site, but I’ve already gone on forever here.  Feel free to get in touch if you want more.

Completely-finally… your site isn’t an affiliate site, but you could benefit from setting up an affiliate program.  A few of the other doctors could help you out with this so do add a comment if you’re interested.

I hope at least something there helps.

Dan.

Clarke

Redirect the pages that are ranking to the new versions via 301 redirects.  It’s not ideal, but it’s better than losing the visitor to a 404 error page.  Your 404 error page is the same as your homepage at the time of review, and that’s going to cause you issues with Google unless of course the server is correctly telling Google it’s a 404 page and it should ignore the content.  Either way, it’s a bad idea to have any 404 showing, check your logs and 301 redirect the links to another page and or front of the site.  Less than ideal but not the end of the world, you have a sitemap in place, and would imagine that Google knows about it, so it should be a case of just waiting for the new pages take effect, but the time can vary on when this will happen in full.

What you should have done where possible is to re-use the same URLs and site structure, unless of course it was not SEO friendly in the 1st place.  Keeping the same page titles during a swap to a new layout and design can help when it comes to not losing rank on the pages that do rank, you can then slowly edit them over time.  I have noticed in the past that any complete shift in site URL structure and page titles leads Google to treating the site like it hasn’t seen it before, and not always a bad thing.  Sometimes you need to take short term pain for the longer term gains the new site structure, page layout and SEO can bring.

By the way, each of your sections in the product menu has the page title “Products: Divine Interiors and Gifts”.  This must be killing you on the SEO front; I would advise you get each title renamed to reflect the products sold in each section.  You also have no description meta-tag for each of your products, again not great for SEO.

Elaine

Your web designer should have used 301 (permanent) redirects on your site.  This is to tell all the search engines that a particular page is no longer available and automatically directs them to the new page.  Here’s some more information, 301 redirect, but your web designer should already know how to do this.
 

Kirsty

Well, if I were you and if the pages that have been 404-ing have counterparts on the new site version, I’d be pulling on my big tackety boots and asking the developer if they wouldn’t mind just bending over and giving me a minute or two to take a good run up.

It’s an easy job for a developer to set up redirects from old page versions to new ones to ensure a smooth transfer for your new site version in the serps. 

Even if there are some pages which didn’t have counterparts in the old site version, your developer should have anticipated 404s and set up a nice looking custom 404 page to help your site visitors find their way around.  

Kier

Hi Janice.

If I understand you correctly the issue you’re having is that with the site change, URLs from the old site are still showing up in Google but aren’t leading anywhere as the URL structure has changed.  To remedy this you need to use what’s called a 301 redirect for all the old URLs and have them redirect to the most relevant page on the new site structure.  You can find more info here.

Editors Note

Hi Janice.  Thanks for sending in your site for review, and apologies for taking so long to get it published.  It’s a very nice looking site overall and fits well with the product offering you have.  However, aside from the Docs reviews, I also noticed that you have a Twitter account associated with the site, although it doesn’t look like you’ve been very active with it since setting up.  You would definitely benefit from putting a little effort into this direction to pull in some targeted traffic to your website.  Without going into all the ins and outs of twitter, take a look at the following two articles by Kieron and Clarke on how to use twitter to grow your business and some general twitter advice and tips.  Kieron has used twitter to great effect in building and promoting his large userbase for ShareMyPlayLists.com.

“Hello, I have a newbie question about subdomains.

I would like to register a generic domain such as http://fromwales.com and run some niche sites on subdomains from it such as http://lavabread.fromwales.com or http://leeks.fromwales.com.

Does that make any sense from an affiliate marketing and SEO point of view?  Will Google always favour http://www.lavabreadfromwales.com over http://lavabread.fromwales.com, or do you think a bit of hard work and good content can make that strategy work?

Many thanks.

Neil”

Clarke

Personally, I would go for a main domain name for each niche site.  It’s better in the long run as it will allow you more flexibility should you wish to sell the site on, change your hosting and any issues you may encounter with link strategy.  For example, if a particular linking strategy were to backfire and kill a site, only the one site would be affected.  If you use sub-domains from one main domain, you run the risk of killing everything in one go.

However, if you have a domain and a lot of “on-topic” mini-sites, then I see no reason why sub-domains would not work.  I have done this on sites in the past, but it was to host different content and prices, based on the country the person was from, and in that case I hosted the sub-domain in an IP range of the country the sub-domain was targeted towards.  Google favours good content; your IP plays a part, but if Google can’t work out what country a site is targeted towards, you will only get ranked based on getting links in and having decent on-page optimisation.

Elaine

I don’t use subdomains on Allkids, but I do have different sections with several pages attached, and I have found that the main page is usually indexed in Google quite high for relevant terms, many at the coveted No 1 position.

For example:

Kids Beds – Single Storage Beds
                   Bunk Beds
                   Cabin, Mid Beds
                   High Sleeper Bed
                   Etc.

The main page, i.e. Kids Beds, is usually the indexed page for most of the ‘kids beds’ related terms, but quite often I get both pages listed, which is a bonus.  Google does take an overview of the whole site, so a large site with a dedicated theme, should win over several smaller sites all interlinked, especially if you take care with the internal linking structure and urls.

At the time of writing, the keywords “laptop computers” received an exact search volume of 550,000 in January; an enviable domain name to have for development if ever you saw one!  However, it is a ruthlessly competitive sector, so Russ posed the following question to give him some ideas on how to progress the site development:

“Hi.

I have the domain name laptopcomputers.co.uk and have commissioned a designer to build me a site.

I have planned a large laptop review site with price comparisons, reviews and possibly videos, however, I would be very interested to see if the doctors have any other thoughts as to what could be included?  You guys think outside the box which can throw up some really interesting ideas.

The development is currently underway, but I’m in a bit of a flap so any input at all would be fantastic.

Thanks and kind regards.

Russ”

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Dan

Hi, Russ, how are you?

Congratulations on the fantastic domain name!  I’ve worked on a few laptop sites amd know you’ll get a ton of search traffic if you can rank well for that.

To be honest, you could do a hundred different things with the site.  BUT I’m going to be the most boring man in the world and suggest you keep it simple for the first few months.  Set yourself some targets, concentrate on the launch, plan some actions to get you to your targets, and put together a longer term plan to make money from the site.

A few examples for targets could be:

1. Reach page 1 of google for the phrase ‘laptop computers’ by June 2010.
2. Increase traffic to the site by at least 100% each week for the first 12 weeks.
3. Add 20 new laptop reviews to the site each month.

Aside from that, one big, big thing you don’t mention in your plan is to build an email list.  A good opt-in list in this niche could be worth thousands every month.  Laptop manufacturers are clambering over themselves to increase market share and have very good advertising budgets.

Hope this helps!

Dan

Lammo

Hi Russ.

How about the ability to compare more than simply price?  By offering your users the chance to compare any two laptops spec next to each other, they can make the purchase decision much easier.  I say this as a non-techie who buys his laptops using the criteria “is it a Toshiba” (they’ve always been reliable in my experience!) and “is it cheap” (I’m tight), but if I can compare two models next to each other and see that one has much larger memory for the same price, then it may sway me to buy there and then, rather than look elsewhere.

Then of course there’s those who NEED a specific amount of RAM, screensize, software.  You could pull all this data from the feeds and effectively let users narrow the entire laptop market to the handful of models that entirely match what they need/want.

Elaine

Hi Russ.

I think there’s plenty of scope for getting some unique pages/content up and running, simply by thinking of all the uses for a laptop.

- Different colours – red laptops, blue laptops
- Kids laptops with security built in – or recommended programmes to install and tips on how to keep kids safe on the web
- Gaming Laptops – need high spec – check out the World of Warcraft specs
- Business Laptops – fast spec, robust for carrying about or lightweight ones
- Long lasting battery life required?
- Basic laptops – is it simply going to be used for research or Facebook etc.
- Laptops for first timers/silver surfers  – with easy to use instructions and links to ‘idiot guides’
- Laptops for music lovers with good sound systems etc.

Good luck.

Kier

Hi Russ.

My main piece of advice would be to keep it simple and be sure what you’re building before it starts, because currently you sound a little unsure of the overall direction.  I’m not sure of the level of experience you have so far, but hiring a designer should only be done where you’ve got a very clear idea of what you want built and are sure that it’s beyond your own skills to do so.  As such, I’d say the trickiest part from what you mentioned is going to be price comparison.

Knocking together a basic CMS or modifying an existing one for a broadly static site consisting of content like reviews, pictures videos etc. isn’t too hard at all, and you could probably do this yourself in fact.  Price comparison however is a big undertaking so think very hard about this aspect, how it will work and how it will interact with the site.  Is price comparison the main focus and reviews etc are for extra fluff or is it the other way round?  Decide what you’re building and make it excellent in that area, then add new features later.

Editor’s Note

Hi Russ. 

Thanks for sending in your proposed site/domain for review.  I’d echo these views and add that with such a generic domain name and a broad number of categories and laptops to promote, try and find a merchant/network that can provide you with good quality feeds to work from.  If you don’t have much experience with feeds, find a developer who does!  It is a potentially massive undertaking in a sector that is very competitive, but you’ve got a fantastic domain on which to build something that could do very well.  Build it slowly and don’t rush to do everything in one fell swoop.

“Hi Docs.

I’m pretty new to affiliate marketing and am building a site for, say, red widgets.  I have both redwidgets.co.uk and redwidgets.info and am wondering which to use?

The site will have a one page review for each type of red widget with a price comparison block in the right hand column.  I am thinking of using the .info domain and swapping the price comparison affilate links for adsense ads (or even USA affilate links – is this possible?) for non-British traffic.

Or would I be better off just sticking to the .co.uk domain and, if so, why?

Really great site, by the way.  Filled with very useful advice – thanks.

Mike”

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Kier

Hi Mike.

The downside to using the .info rather than the .co.uk is twofold.  Firstly .info isn’t a TLD that’s generally associated with good quality sites.  Secondly, by passing up on the .co.uk you’ll be missing out on the high ranking Google will give to it for UK based searches.  As such, at a very minimum you should use the .co.uk for a UK focused site.  You could develop the .info into one aimed at the US, but be sure to not use duplicate content; you might want to consider using a .com for this.  Also bear in mind that affiliate marketing is even bigger in the USA than it is in the UK, so there’s no reason to be using adsense instead as it’s likely you’ll be able to find US affiliate programs to promote that stock your product.  Good networks to check out in the states for retail include CJ, Google Affiliate Network, Linkshare, Shareasale and of course Webgains.

Lammo

Hi Mike.

Purely my own opinion, but I don’t like .info domains, and would never use one.  Stick with the .co.uk, and just geotarget (Google “geotargeting” to see how to do this) to change the content based on the non-British traffic, or dig deep and buy the .com for the US traffic.

Price comparison for USA affiliate links is totally possible – just grab the feeds from the US networks as you would with the UK.  If you’re not tech-savvy to build your own price comparison, then Easy Content Units will have a US version very shortly (or it may even be live by the time you read this!) which will do that for you.

Clarke

If you are doing the “same” site targeted to different countries, then I would use both and host the UK on a UK server and the US site on a US server.  I would also make sure that the content is significantly different for each country version, and that you use American English e.g. Center and not Centre etc..  You will need to build different links in to each site, so you are in effect taking on double the work if you’re doing it right.  However, most people are a bit lazy and do the same thing when the sites cover the same subject, but this can ultimately lead to Google thinking you have just duplicated your site content when clearly you have a purpose for having two totally separate sites covering the same subject area.

If you’re new, I would get one site up and running 1st to make sure it works and you can rank before you do the 2nd, but that will depend on how much time you have and whether you will be upset if they don’t work out or not.

Kirsty

I would recommend that you make use of the .co.uk domain.  For the UK market it’ll be more brandable and SEO friendly.  I’ve found people are far more likely to click on domains with the .co.uk extension.  .info domains are often seen as having an association with spammy websites.  In the past MSN have blocked access to that extension on their service and Google have made ominous maneuvers regarding sites on such domains (a couple of years ago now).

If you want to try and target the US market in the same niche you’d be better to try and source a .com – it seems like a much safer bet!

With that said, they planned to promote the service via the affiliate channel and wanted to pick the docs brains as to where the best place would be to advertise the scheme.  Commission was set at £30 for each sale, paid directly into a PayPal account, with monthly affiliate prizes of £3,000 to the affiliate generating the most sales.

Unfortunately, when when the docs came to review the site, it was down, and only one doc got review the live site; it hasn’t appeared since.  Although the site is no longer, I thought it would still be of benefit to publish the docs reviews on how they would go about promoting a new affiliate scheme.

Here’s what the docs had to say:

Kier

Hi David.

The least time intensive method to get affiliates is to join a network.  Going the in-house route can work well too, but you’ll need plenty of time to devote to recruiting the affiliates and keeping them paid and happy.  The quickest way to find relevant affiliates is just to head to Google and try some searches for terms you’d like to appear on and see where you can find affiliate sites and then contact them.  For instance I’d try stuff like ‘hosting reviews’, ‘cheap wordpress hosting’ etc..  As things stand though, I think you may struggle to find productive affiliates, the market for hosting is very tough and there are a lot of good affiliate programs for hosting out there, I’m not sure your offering is particularly competitive.

Mark

Hi David.

Thanks for submitting your enquiry to the Doctors, and I hope the following will help you understand what you need to do to promote your affiliate campaign.

If you want to promote your affiliate campaign on your own platform, then I would suggest that you spend time targeting relevant people to promote your campaign, and contact people directly to inform them of your campaign.

You could also use some of the affiliate marketing forums to communicate information about your campaign, but please be careful when submitting things onto forums about your campaign and ensure that you submit them in the relevant place – don’t spam.

You could also consider using an affiliate network to track the sales and have the benefit of the reach that an affiliate network will have to relevant affiliates already.  You would need to pay for this, but as a rule of thumb you would pay a set-up fee, a monthly fee and an override on the commission you pay to affiliates, so you are best to contact more than one affiliate network about your campaign offering.

I would also edge on the side of caution when trying to use affiliate marketing for Business to Business propositions as there are a limited number of affiliates that are strong in this space.  I would also make sure that you ask the network about that before working with them, and maybe consider asking a few affiliates on forums about their experience with these networks for your products.

I hope this is useful, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

Clarke

Hi David.

As I can’t see the website to read up on the services you’re offering I won’t be able to give you any feedback, so I will address the how to promote it via affiliates part of your question.  The best places to advertise affiliate opportunities is the A4U Forum, affiliate blogs, your own Twitter account and by contacting affiliates directly.

A4U Forum

You’re free to make a post but can speak to Matt’s team with regards to placement of an onsite advert and the Affiliate Solus email opportunities.

Affiliate Blogs

These are a fantastic place to advertise affiliate opportunities as they tend to have the more engaged affiliates reading, the ones that want to learn more and stay up to date with what affiliates in the know have to say.  Plus I dare say if you’re an onsite advertiser, you could probably approach them with your press release or even a free demo account and get a free write up, but be warned, you can’t pay affiliates to write good things about you, so you will need to accept that if they review your service, they will say what they like as well as what they don’t like about it.

Twitter, is a great marketing tool that’s still being overlooked.  Granted, there are a lot more people on Twitter these days, but you will be surprised how it’s brushed off by people who are not feeling the Twitter love.  Get an account, get following the Twitter lists of the affiliates in the UK, start interacting and most of all, post information about what you do and why affiliates should check it out etc..

Contacting Affiliates Directly

This is hard work with a small percentage success rate of affiliates actually replying to emails out of the blue.  First, I would take a look at the types of affiliates you’re after, then make a list and contact them and use whatever means you can, be it email, phone, letter, Twitter etc., but please don’t spam them all.  By this I mean really look in to each one and don’t just grab the first email you can find and send a generic ‘send to all’ message; that’s got very little chance of working.

“I run a web development company, Anoveta, and although it’s not an affiliate site I don’t have much experience in SEO beyond the basics of the on-page stuff.  I’m looking for some general suggestions as to how the site could be improved.

I’ve recently changed the design on the site and it seems to be getting between 10 and 30 uniques a day, but I’ve only had one conversion from it in the last month, so I’d appreciate any advice on how to improve that.”

Here’s what the docs had to say …

Jay

Who is your target market?  What is your USP?  If you can answer both those questions you should get a few ideas as to how to portray that and further improve your site.

From an SEO point of view, it would make sense if you could hone your target market in order to choose keywords.  Do you have a geographical area that you wish to target?  If so you might consider ‘web design Durham’ or ‘web development Durham’ as your target keywords and ensure you have a page named after this on the site.  This will narrow the number of websites you are competing against in SERPs (as opposed to the entire of the North East of England) and might also give you a local appeal.  You’ve got a great link from a well trusted domain, dur.ac.uk (a Durham-based site, so great context for targeting Durham) thanks to your previous work – and you’ve used great anchor text so keep up the good work there.

I’d also recommend targeting the homepage to catch your ideal client’s eye.  For example, the ‘hero image’ on your homepage is of a girl in a field.  Perhaps this could be a snapshot or scrolling gallery of your work, linking through to your portfolio page.  If that doesn’t appeal, an image of a successful small business owner could also work; someone who looks very happy with their website and has a booming business as a result!  It’s a cliché, but clichés work.

At every step of your site design, ask yourself what route you want your website’s visitors to take.  In your case, keep suggesting to the viewer that they should find your contact details, and now, through obvious buttons and text.  Oh, and keep all contact details and calls to action above the fold!  Simple technique, but it’s proven to work wonders.  I expect your portfolio page is probably one of the most visited too – it’s how web design is normally sold to a prospect – so make sure that it’s easy to get to and digest.

In order to get visitors to act as fast as possible, perhaps sell web design to them through how it’s the perfect timing in the current economic climate to be thinking about marketing (i.e. web design).  Or you could have a time sensitive offer, or promote festive web development examples that you have.  You just need to keep answering your visitors’ questions at every turn: “what’s in it for me?”, “why should I contact you rather than the next person?”.  If you can do that, combined with a bit of SEO, you should have a steady flow of traffic to a well-converting site.  Don’t forget to let a bit of personality shine through – some character makes you more human and approachable and can actually form part of your USP.  You could do that through a blog or news section – great for SEO!

Clarke

Hi James.

5 headliners for you “Content, Title Tags, Links, Links, Links”.

I see your site is built on Wordpress so that’s cool, it’s going to make things a lot easier.  So before I talk about the “5 headliners”, let’s get some of the basics that I would do if it was me.  Others will have their own view on what plug-ins they like better, but I can only tell you what I have used and what has worked for me.

You have no site map from what I can see, so who’s pinging Google with your site changes and all the pages that can be found on your site?   Sure, Google and pals are great for crawling the web, but they have site maps to help them do it better, so get the “Google XML Sitemaps” plug-in.

I see you have a SEO plug-in called “Platinum SEO Pack”; can’t comment on it, but I have a feeling it’s not as good as “All in One SEO Pack”.  Personally I would remove the other and get that one instead, but it’s your choice.

Content

OK … on to the content, and by this, I mean what you have on page and what you have in your meta-descriptions.  I am not the worlds best at copy (a wordsmith I am not!) but your own page copy seems alright.  Try and make sure you that you have keywords you want to rank for peppered across the site (not stuffed, but at least included once or twice in the site copy).  You’re not going to be in the top 10 for “Web Development”, “Web Design” or “UK Website Hosting” so stop trying.  Instead, go more local like “Durham Web Development” or whatever areas you’re after.  Sure, we all want work from all over the place, but honestly, you would do better finding a large local area to be number 1 on first before you go national.  Use the H1 etc. tags to your advantage, get your keywords to stand out, but don’t over do it.  Your meta-descriptions are boring, no one is going to read them and think, “Hey should click this link”.  It’s a pain to do, but if you can craft all your meta-descriptions per page as if you were paying £1 a click for someone reading the text, then you’ll get a much higher click through rate.  Something I need to do more of myself.

Title Tags

Title Tags are so important, and yours I am afraid are shocking.  I suspect it’s the “SEO” plug in that’s doing the work, but why on earth it’s using a non-standard dot thing as a separator is beyond me.  Use a “-“ or “|”, or even a “,” or “.” is ok, but personally I use “-“ or “|” when I separate my words.

“Web Development, Web Design, UK Website Hosting • Anoveta” is your main page title tag, so that’s clearly all of your important words as the rest of the pages have nothing!  Instead I would have a page for each of your main areas and customise the title to that page and go longer tail; you will not be top 10 for “Web Design”, so go for something like “Durham Web Design”.  You should be able to get in to the top 5 for that with a little work.

Links, Link, Links

Links, Links, Links.  So we are clear, all the on page optimisation is a complete waste of time if you don’t get links.  You should do it to give you an edge over people going for the same keywords, and indeed, if your on page stuff is good, you might not need many links – but you still need links.  You need links to your main page and you need links to your key pages inside your site.

OK … so on to the good news.  You have designed a site for a college; way hey!, happy days you can get free .ac.uk links back to your site   The problem is you have targeted ‘keyword links’ back to your site.  There’s nothing really wrong with that other than that the main page you link to contains the mixed message page of “I don’t know what I want to rank for”, yet your keyword link back clearly says you want to rank for “Durham Web Development”.  Why don’t you have that in your title tag, your meta description and text on your main page if it’s important?  So fix that and it will do wonders, but don’t forget to get more links.

By the way, have you researched if that’s even the right keyword you want to go for?  Do more people type in “Durham Web Development” or “Durham Web Design”?  You should look in to that using your logs and tools like Google Adwords Keyword Generator.

Last bit of advice, always try and get links back from work you have done for clients, however be aware, as if you were doing work for the likes of me, I would have already told you up front I am paying you for the design, without credits, because I am a control freak as to where I link to LOL, so expect that from time to time; a jobs a job

Elaine

Hi James – the first thing I look for when I’m interested in a product or service is some indication of the price, which I think is important for prospective customers, especially those who may only want a very simple, entry site, at the moment it seems that you’re mainly looking for larger projects – you could be missing out here.

I also found the site a tad technical, it might be helpful if you had a glossary section which explained everything in simple, layman’s terms – and I mean everything, we do forget that 90% of the population have no idea when it comes to the internet, phrases such as web hosting, e-commerce websites, customer management systems etc..

I’m also surprised there’s no mention of SEO and if/how you can help them create a presence on the web – organic and PPC options – another area that most folk find totally confusing.

I’d hurry up and finish the portfolio page, this is probably not helping, it does look very sparse – I’d consider removing it until you had a wider selection to showcase.

I’d simply make it more simpler, let prospective customers know exactly what you can do for them, and some indication of price, especially for the lower end.

Good Luck.

Kier

Hi James

First thing I’d do is make your call to action more explicit, for instance instead of saying ‘get in touch’, have it say ‘Call or email us now for a quote!’ and move this from the bottom right corner to somewhere much more visible such as the top left.  Your navigation also feels a bit oddly placed, maybe consider moving this to the left hand column or another more common placing.

There’s so many things you could tweak really, my main piece of advice would be to get Google Site Optimiser on there and start running tests, and always treat the site as a work in progress, not something to have a ‘redesign’ every year or so.  I’d strongly recommend you read Google Website Optimiser 101, it’s a fantastic article from the guys at Conversion Rate Experts and should give you plenty of inspiration for improving not only your site but any future sites you build for clients.

Clarke is “The Codfather of Affiliate Marketing” and one of the very first pioneers to embrace it many moons ago in 1997.  Based in Glasgow with his wife and children, Clarke has pretty much seen it, done it and bought the proverbial t-shirt many, many times over.  With extensive experience in all aspects of Affiliate Marketing, Clarke is a seasoned entrepreneur with a number of successful businesses to his name as both an Affiliate and an Affiliate Network Director.  Clarke is also an active member of Nominet UK and attends meetings where he tries to ensure that the voice of the Affiliate is heard.

His first venture into the world of the Internet began in 1996 when he set up a site for the pop band 911!  After a year of designing websites for other companies, his career saw the shift into Affiliate Marketing in 1997 where he cut his teeth marketing web hosting through the affiliate channel.  Three years later, Clarke teamed up with Graeme Sandwell to set up UK Internet Sites Ltd.  Together, they launched a large number of successful affiliate sites in market sectors as diverse as competitions and freebies to gadgets and swimwear to name but a few.  With a firm grasp on the affiliate channel, the dynamic duo went on to launch their very own Affiliate Network in 2003, Paid On Results, which to date boasts 149 merchants and 20,900+ affiliates spanning no less than 22+ different market sectors.

Clarke is widely regarded as one of the pioneers who inspired and mentored many of today’s successful affiliates.  When Mark Boyd interviewed the candidates shortlisted for the Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2009 in the A4U Awards, several of them credited Clarke as the most influential person to have helped them on their way.  To quote Affiliate Doc, Lammo, “if it hadn’t have been for Clarke Duncan, I would probably still be a Civil Servant today”.

Outside of work and Affiliate Marketing conferences (where he has a penchant for candle theft ), Clarke enjoys Photography, World of Warcraft and his beloved iPhone.  In fact, during his spare time he can often be found hanging around Glasgow Airport; he claims this is because his son likes to watch the planes take off, but we all know he’s really waiting for the next baggage handler/terrorist scuffle so he can sell the photos to the newspapers!

Interesting fact about Clarke: He is physically unable to smile in photographs without giving a “double thumbs up” gesture!

Anecdotes aside, it’s a great honour to have Clarke join the panel of Affiliate Doctors and we look forward to seeing some great insights.

Welcome on board Clarke.

Clarke’s Bio