A Guide to Affiliate Marketing in Australia

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of getting a website to work better with search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN.

SEO will be your best form of marketing as it can be specifically targeted and best of all- brings visitors to your website for free.

There are 4 major steps to building your SEO campaign and this includes:

• Keywords
• URL and Page Title
• H1 tags
• Link Building

Choosing effective keywords

Choosing effective keywords for your SEO campaign is the first important step. When choosing keywords think of what you believe customers are typing into a search engine that specifies your website. For example don’t choose generic terms such as DVD if your website is a DVD store. These generic terms are highly competitive and is a tough ask to become highly rated.

Targeting a suitable market will depend on your website, as well as the products and services you offer. Try to be specific with your keywords, and remember that people no longer use single keyword search phrases - the average search phrase contains 3-5 related words.

To find out how competitive a keyword simply do a Google search and note how many results come up for the phrase. The more sites competing for the phrase, the harder it is it get a high ranking.

As a rough guide, try to optimise every page on your site for a different search phrase. Each search phrase should contain 2 to 3 highly targeted keywords.

URL and Page Title

The two most determining factors of how Google rates your website is by its URL (www.example.com) and your Page Title.

For example, if you were looking to build a DVD rentals website www.dvd-rentals.com.au would rank higher than www.companyname.com.au assuming they have similar content and minimal traffic. If having specific keywords in your URL looks out-of-place you can also append keyword URL’s to your site such as www.companyname.com.au/dvd-rentals.html

Your Page Title is just as important as your domain name. Using keywords in your title tag can improve your Google ranking significantly. Trying to achieve a balance of professionalism with keyword density in the title tag can sometimes a little more difficult.

Going back to our earlier example of a DVD website, a good title tag would be:

<title>”Get DVD Rentals Online at Company Name.”</title>

Usually, the closer to the front of your title tag the keywords are placed, the better.

H1 Tags

The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you’re using a <h1> tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page. Here’s a quick example:

<h1>Google knows this text is more important</h1>
<p>… than this text</p>

Links

Having other relevant websites link to your site gives your site more juice. Think of links as a form popularity. The more people that like your website (and link) the more relevant your website will be categorised Google and other Search Engine.

Again going back to our earlier example with the DVD company we will create suitable links that we will incorporate our targeted keywords. An example of this might be:

<a href=http://www.yourwebsite.com.au>Rent DVD’s Online</a>

If you can get your link partners to add this snippet of code to their website it will add to your link popularity and at the same time boost your keyword focus.