May 2007 - Taking Your Site to the Next Level

FEATURED COMMENTARY

By Colette Marshall
Affiliate Manager

Taking Your Site to the Next Level through Natural Search
The best kind of traffic is the free kind—that is, the traffic that comes from natural search engine rankings. Acquiring those rankings, however, takes time and a dedicated effort; but once you achieve that positioning, it’s only a matter of doing a little maintenance work. And, most importantly, you don’t have to reinvest half your profits back into advertising to maintain the higher sales volumes you achieve.

How to Get Ahead
So how do you improve your rankings without spending a fortune? Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon of StomperNet, emphasize that the key to increasing your rankings isn’t decoding a complex mathematical algorithm, but having good content and employing that content to better your positioning:

Create your site in HTML. It’s not enough to just have good content: you have to put that content in a form that’s search engine friendly.

Use RSS feeds to syndicate your content. Search engines love fresh, changing content. Publish your articles using a blog, and syndicate and submit them to article directories. Says Jenkins, “As you give out quality content to other sites, you not only increase your own link popularity, but you also enhance your site in the search engines.”

Proper SEO Takes Time
You can take short cuts that will let you get ahead in the search results—until the next time the search engine companies change their ranking algorithms. But staying ahead requires doing things the right way: you have to create useful, interesting content and give visitors a reason to come back to your site. You’re building a business—short cuts won’t pay off in the long run.

If you have an established site, you could begin to see more visitors and more sales from real, diligent SEO efforts in a very short time—sometimes even a week or less. If, however, you’re just starting your online business, even with your exhaustive efforts, it may take six weeks to a couple of months before you start to see traffic trickling through. But as Jenkins points out, “The payoff is search engine positions that endure even when Google, Yahoo, and MSN update their algorithms.”

StomperNet is offering a $1 trial of their membership forum for 30 days. It opens May 10th, but you can pre-register to be at the front of the line at StomperNet.net.

As always if there are any questions or concerns regarding OneSource or the affiliate program in general, Colleen and I are always available through email affiliateteam@worldwidebrands.com or phone 877 637 6774 x 8123 (Colette) or 8121 (Colleen)

Don't forget to check out the "Did You Know?" Section to the right for important program announcements.