Poker69's Affiliate Blog

Creating A Site From Scratch - Part 3 - SEO'ing and Preparing For Visitors

Continuation from Part 1 and Part 2, if you haven't read them go do that now..

Part 3 - In this post of the blog series I will talk about the type of SEO'ing I do when I first launch a site, as well as the things I do to prepare for visitors.

SEOing:

Like I talked about in the last post a little bit, one of the more important things when SEO'ing is to have your on page SEO stuff in place. This is probably best to do when you are first posting up the content, and includes things like H1, H2 tags, using the keyword in your content, title, and alt text of images, and bolding keywords within your articles.

Now that my site has roughly 15+ pages of content I can start building links towards the site to get it indexed, and ultimately ranking in the search engines.

Everybody has different ways of doing their SEO'ing, and no one way is correct. I am not suggesting you do exactly what I do, but I will share a couple of the things I like to do for SEO when I build a site.

Link Exchanges - When I create a site I always include a "resource" type page linked to from every page on my site (some people only link to it from the homepage which I don't really understand). These resource type pages are my pages that I do exchanges with other webmasters, or sometimes just include links I like on the page. I try to actually make this a resource for people who want to leave my site and are looking for other similar sites (gambling sites). I always give an intro paragraph to why the page is up there so that the visitors understand, and also include a description of each site I link out to.

For my March Madness site I contacted a couple of friends that have some great gambling sites and asked if they would want to exchange links. They agreed, suggested a couple of their sites, and we put up each others sites on our sites. There we go, about 7 or 8 free and easy links on good sites to get things started.

Blogging - Personally I have two (or even three) different blogs that I can write just about anything in and include links to my sites when I want. I have my personal blog (in my sig), and then the PAL/CAL blogs. If you are going to write a blog post to specifically include a link to your site, please make the post useful as well....it makes it better for a lot of different reasons.

So far I have only linked to my March Madness Predictions site from the CAL blog, but I will soon link out to it from my other two blogs when I have something to write about that can relate to the site.

Writing Content For Others - Being an affiliate and webmaster, one of the hardest things for most people is writing content. Writing content can be hard, boring, annoying, frustrating etc. The crappy thing is that content is extremely important, and we all want/need quality content for our sites. One way to get a link to your site would be to ask your affiliate buddies if they need any content written about a specific subject that relates to your site, or you can somehow include a link to your site within the article. A lot of webmasters would be happy to receive some free content and let you link to your site, as long as it is a quality article and your site getting linked to is quality. An hours work of writing can get you a nice quality free link, and help your buddy out at the same time.

I haven't done any of this for MarchMadnessPredictions.org yet, but I am planning on asking a few friends from the forums if they need any content about sports betting, or even a review of a poker room that has a sportsbook attached to it this week. (if you are in need send me an im, pm or comment here!)

Guest Posts - A lot of affiliates have personal blogs. A lot of affiliates have personal blogs that are rarely updated with fresh content. It wouldn't hurt to ask a fellow affiliate if you could make a guest post about affiliating on their personal blog, as long as you put some thought into the article your writing.

I will probably ask around this weekend or next week if anyone would let me make a guest post on their blog, so I can get another free link to the site.

Links From My Other Sites - Maybe the easiest way to get links to your site is linking from other sites of yours. If you have another site that relates to, or that you could relate to your site naturally somehow, you could always link to your new site from there.

I have a handful of sports betting related sites, and even some closely related sports prediction type sites, that I will be linking to my March Madness site from. In fact one of the first links I got going to the site was a closely related NBA predictions site of mine.

SEO'ing conclusion - Those are just some of the things you can do for SEO'ing your site when you start up. I use all of the above, and even try to find a couple other ways to get links to my site. Remember quality over quantity when it comes to links... for lesser competitive terms you can probably get a site ranking with 3 or 4 quality links.

Preparing For Visitors:

As I have already begun my SEO work, and my site should be appearing in the search engines soon, I need to get ready for my visitors.

Yesterday I saw something that blew my mind in the PAL forums. One of the members had posted that they ONLY receive 150 visitors per day so they didn't have affiliate links or calls to action up on their site yet. OMG are you crazy? New affiliates look at this:

150 visitors per day:

Converting 1 in every 450 visitors into a RMP @ a $125 CPA
=$40 per day, $1250 per month, or $15,000 a year

Converting 1 of the 150 visitors a day into a RMP @ a $125 CPA
= $125 per day, $3750 per month, $45,625 a year!

Your awesome at converting visitors and 2 of those daily 150 visitors convert
=$250 per day, $7500 per month, $91,250 a year!!!

Those numbers are cool to see, and help you realize what you could be missing out on. Seriously if you have a lonely TWO visitors per day you still want to be trying to convert them into RMPs, or you're simply missing out on "easy" money.

From day one of getting visitors I want to make sure I have some calls to action in place and my affiliate links up. I am getting my google analytics up today, and over the next few days I will start implementing calls to actions within my articles (already have them in some).

Part 4 - E-mail Capture/Split Testing/Converting (Coming Tuesday most likely)

Greg asked me to come on the radio show tonight, so I think I will be doing that around 8:30 EST (intermission of the Canada Olympic Hockey game ), listen in! ** EDIT - The radio show was rescheduled, but I will probably be on sometime soon if they ask me again.