Choosing the Right Keywords
As I stated before, keywords are used to help you generate traffic to your website. This is why it is so important that you choose the right keywords for your own website. When you are choosing keywords, you should choose words that are not simply related to your website’s content, but that actually describe the content. When you do this, you will avoid getting the wrong kind of traffic and actually get the kind of traffic that may bring you some business. For example, if you are using your website to sell dog food, you will want to get traffic from people who are looking for dog food and not those who are looking for dog collars. If you choose ‘dog’ as your keyword, you will end up with a great deal of traffic on your website, but you are not guaranteed to get any sales out of it.
Think about it, how many times do you conduct a search on the web, only to find yourself smack dab in the middle of a website that has nothing to do with what you are looking for except that the site uses a common word or word phrase that you used in your search query? It happens to me all of the time and I just end up leaving the site automatically and just a little bit angrier than when I began the query in the first place. The key point I am making in this section is that you could find that it is easier to get affiliations when you approach sites with a certain quote of regular traffic already established. It will certainly make it easier for you to link up with other websites because it shows progress in your effort. This will be particularly great if you are seeking pay per click. You might be wondering just how any of this is going to help you with your affiliation quest in real life. Well…incoming links from sites that are related to your topic may give you a fair boost in engines such as Google and Yahoo! Google has a tendency to group related pages in clusters that are devoted to a specific topic. At the center of these clusters are pages with a lot of inbound links from sites in the same cluster.
If you can get a link from one of these major sites, you are in luck, as the search engine will find your site more relevant for queries related to this specific topic. What is this really called—Affiliation! It helps a lot if the text of the inbound link contains the keyword phrase that you are optimizing the page for. Search engines such as Google try to find out what the main topic of your page is. One way of doing this is to analyze the main subject matter of sites linking to yours. You should also avoid link farms. Links from free-for-all link farms that are set up to increase the participants' link popularity should be avoided at all costs. The reason why is because those clever people out there have found ways to spam the link popularity ranking, by establishing link farms where the members are guaranteed links from the other member sites in return for adding a similar link page to their own site. Basically a link farm is a public affiliation. If you are trying to use this method to get more business, you want to go with a private affiliation because that is not as open to spam artists.
Those guys as Google are very clever too because Google has started punishing sites that have link-farm pages, and other search engines are expected to do the same thing because it is the ‘IN’ thing to do. If you are a member of one of these schemes, you have to delete the important link page and ask to be removed from the others. There are also a lot of free-for-all link collections, “directories,” and “search engines” out there, that are set up to harvest the e-mail addresses of webmasters. That is why it is also not recommended that you post your email addresses on your website either. These harvesters search for the ‘@’ symbol that is used in the email address and add them to spam lists. It is for this reason that you will likely loose points on your website with the search engines so you would be better off just avoiding these automatic search engine links at all costs. Genuine website affiliation requires that you do more than just add a link, so be on the look out!
