Affiliate Marketing Newbie SEO 101

Search engine optimization, better known as “SEO” can be a daunting process for affiliate marketing newbies to learn. However, we cannot stress enough the importance of mastering this process in order to succeed in the business of affiliate marketing. This may seem like a tall order for a newbie to the whole SEO game, but fortunately there are a couple of things you can learn that will help you understand, and hopefully implement, the SEO process to quickly boost your site’s ranking.

What is SEO?

The first step is to get a basic understanding of what SEO is and how it will benefit your affiliate marketing site. Search engine optimization is an important skill that will allow your website or webpage to get better rankings in search engines, such as Google, which in turn makes it easier for people to discover your site so you can make money online. There are a lot of techniques and processes involved in SEO, which is why learning how it works first of all is one of the most important lessons for affiliate marketing newbies.

Basically, SEO helps online businesses get a certain amount of exposure on the web by making them more visible and easier to find through the use of search engine indexing software. This allows the search engines to redirect traffic to your site and business, improving your chances of receiving a steady stream of market.

How is your site or page ranked?

Before your website can make full use of SEO, you must first get it indexed by search engines. How this works is that search engines find your website or webpage through the use of different indexing programs, such as “bots”or spiders that basically follows all links that lead to your site or page and downloads copies of it as it goes.

After this, your site or page will be analyzed and indexed based on some algorithms and criteria set by the search engines, thereby giving your site its ranking. This can be achieved through effective link building, which requires you to create connections to other sites that have similar contents to that of your site.

Benefits of SEO for your site

One of the more obvious benefits of SEO is that It can help improve your site’s web ranking in search engines, thereby increasing the amount of web traffic that your website can generate. Since your site is now easier to locate on the web, it is a safe bet that there will be a significant change in the amount of visits from potential customers that your site can get. Keep in mind that making your site easier to find makes a whole lot of difference in the survival of any online business.

Avoid spamming

Spamming is one way of getting traffic directed to your website, however, this type of method will only work for a short period of time, and will ultimately lead to your site’s failure.

This type of method works by literally tricking traffic to get redirected to your site through the use of some deceptive techniques, such as using irrelevant keywords and using duplicate content on other sites just to try and increase your site’s page ranking.

Initially, this can generate some traffic to your site, but it will create some problems later on for your site, resulting in the loss of some potential customers along the way.

Learning how the entire SEO system works is your first step towards managing your online business or website, especially for an affiliate marketing newbie such as yourself. Understanding how it works can help you determine what other steps you need to take in order to fully realize and take advantage of the entire SEO process in turning your business into a complete online success.

Ten “Must-Know” Acronyms for Affiliate Marketing Newbies

Affiliate marketing newbies take note. You will quickly discover that visions of acronyms and affiliate marketing terms are haunting your sleep. Relax, you’re not alone. It’s not the least bit unusual for affiliate marketing newbies to experience acronym overload at some point in the learning process. Well we’ve been there too, and we understand the need to have one place to find the definitions of those acronyms that are most relevant to this business.

We’ve discovered that there’s a whole new lingo that all affiliate marketing newbies need to learn. In the following quick reference guide we share the ten most common acronyms. We’ll provide updates periodically, so stay tuned.

1. CTR – Click-Thru-Rate – The percentage of people who actually click on a banner.

2. PPC – Pay Per Click – This is when you get paid each time a customer clicks a certain link.

3. RSS Feed – Really Simply Syndication, Rich Site Summary, Raw Data Feed Site Summary – You have certain reader programs (Google Reader, Internet Explorer has a reader) that allows you to subscribe to the RSS Feeds of different websites and see the updates on those sites as soon as they make them.

4. SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Used to ensure that a website ranks at the top of a search engine result. This is a popular marketing technique that uses articles, keywords and other methods to help ensure the website is within the top results and thus more likely to be seen by searchers.

5. CPA – Cost-Per-Action – Refers to a click, lead or sale. For example, a merchant offers its affiliates $0.30 per newsletter sign-up. Even if the visitor doesn’t buy anything, the merchant will still pay you for the “action” or in this case, the newsletter sign-up.

6. CR – Conversion Ratio – The percentage of clicks, views, etc., needed to achieve a specific action (sale, lead, etc.). Translation: If one out of one hundred visitors to your website signs up for your report or newsletter, your website has a two percent signup ratio for that item.

7. SEM – Search Engine Marketing – Promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). Methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, paid inclusion, digital asset optimization and contextual advertising. This term is also used to describe an individual (Search Engine Marketer).

8. HTML – Hyper-Text Markup Language – the authoring language used to create documents on the internet and to define the layout and structure of web documents using various attributes and tags.

9. URL – Uniform Resource Locator – the global address of documents on the internet specifies the protocol identifier and the resource location name (IP address or domain name) which are separate by a colon and two forward slashes.

10. ISP – Internet Service Provider – a company that provides access to the Internet for a monthly fee. Service includes a modem which allows you to log on to the Internet to browse, and also allows you to send and receive email.

Affiliate marketing newbies: These are important acronyms to know and understand. They are critical not only to online marketing but also to everyday life on the world wide web (WWW) in the 21st Century.