For great placement on search engines, you should use great content articles, drawing targeted traffic to your website as well as providing search engine spiders something they can tell is valuable. The better your content is, the more likely your customers will become that most valuable type of customer: a repeat customer. By using original articles by you, or by purchasing them from article directories or article brokers, you can keep your website filled with fresh, keyword-rich information.

Keyword-rich articles are what spiders (the automated programs used by search engines to catalog websites) look for when they go to new websites. If a spider can easily tell that you're selling rubber chickens, it can then catalog you with the other people selling rubber chickens so that searches for that term bring up your website as well as similar ones.

People used to do this with metatags – information in the header of a webpage – but so many sites were loading the metatags with terms that had nothing to do with the page the search engines stopped cataloging them heavily. Now they look for those key words in the text of your website, particularly with header tags and in the early part of your site content.

By keeping your content fresh and unique, you can keep the customers that find your website in these searches. Keeping your page simple and with few graphics will keep your customers coming back for more content as often as you can add new content to the site. Pages should be easy to scan and laid out well, and the site should be easy to navigate.

Affiliate Links: Another Source of Income and Traffic

By including affiliate links on your website, you can make extra profit while improving your ranking in the search engines.

Affiliate links are links from your website to someone else who's selling something. A good example is a book review website that includes links back to Amazon for each book reviewed; if you have an affiliate agreement, Amazon tracks the click back to the site that referred it – the review site, in this example – and credits them with the visit. Generally, click-throughs earn a certain amount of money, and in some cases a sale earns even more. The affiliate also links to your website somewhere on theirs, ideally herding even more traffic back to you.

But how does this improve your ranking? Most people know that the search engines look for keywords when ranking web pages. The number of links to your website also influences your position in the rankings. If you have dozens of links from affiliates to your site, the search engines will note that and your position will move up; after all, with dozens of links you must be an important site!

So how do you get these affiliate links? The most important thing you can do is make your website valuable to the affiliate. When you link to another site, it's as if you're saying, here, look at this website, it's good. It becomes a personal recommendation. If your site has little or no value, that looks terrible on the affiliate.

If, however, your site is crammed with excellent information, you make the affiliate look good; he or she is providing a valuable service. For instance, you have a recipe website, from which you want to sell spices, special blends, and cooking accessories for an affiliate cooking store. If you have six recipes copied from the back of a Betty Crocker cake box, you're not likely to have a good reception from the cooking store. They would not appear very intelligent if they linked to this sort of website.

If, however, you have hundreds of good original recipes or a very complete Cajun recipe database or some other especially valuable content, the cooking store is much more apt to want to link to you. And there you go: you're selling the spice mixes you're recommending in your recipes, right on your website. And the store supplying the mixes is linking back to you, which increases your level in search engine rankings.

Better yet, if you use hyperlinks from the recipe, you can slip the affiliate links directly into the text of your content articles. Your website isn't cluttered with someone's ads, and you have supplied an easy way for your site viewers to get a needed article. And you make money doing it! Thumbnail graphics – graphics that have been physically shrunk to postage-stamp size to save space – are another excellent way to slip links into your page unobtrusively. Make certain you shrink them in a graphics program, not by resetting image size in your web design program! This is crucial to make the graphics worthwhile and for your Internet Marketing effort.

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To Your Success
Cody Moya