SEO / Affiliate / Social Media Tip of The Week

Well I missed a couple due to the amount of work I had on. But I thought I'd jot these two tips of the week down and see what you guys think.

I covers the three main areas I'm involved in, Affiliate Marketing, SEO and Social Media and is a great way to move up the SERPS, click throughs to merchant sites and then conversion rates.

Google, in my opinion, looks at bounce rates and how long people spend on your site when the they have come from a SERP. If someone rears out of the site quickly then they feel confident in assuming that the site isn't relevant for that query.

The important task that affiliates face is making sure that there is engaging content which informs users before they go on and select a merchant's link.

I've done some testing, and I know you can never test one ranking factor in isolation, but I'm confident that adding content such as YouTube product videos helps engage and inform and hence keeps them in the site longer.

The site I used to test was my Nokia N77 one. I created some content and got minimal links. I didn't overly monetise it or add Adsense or anything else. There's only one page, there's raw affiliate links, but there is YouTube content and fresh news sources.

In my mind, this level useful content has pushed the site up more overtly optimised sites and some that have been around for years and have built up a lot of trust.

I believe that many affiliates believe that they should be aiming to get the visitor in and out as quickly as possible. This may be true for PPC landing pages, but for SEO, I believe the tide has turned to favour true, informative, educational, engaging sites.

These sites are typically called Web 2.0 or social media sites. In my A4UExpo presentation I looked at ways of adding web 2.0 features but also gave the reasons why affiliates should be looking social media. I hope from that presentation that many didn't go away thinking that they should be following the extreme social media optimisation tactics that the Halloween costume guy did, but I feel that many affiliate sites can be relatively easily tweaked to include social media elements that will not only increase CTRs and conversion rates, but also natural search performance.

So, you could go down the route of adding YouTube videos, do what Holiday Watchdog does and get people to add their own direct into the site, get feeds of comments about the topic embeded, and relevant news, include useful photos etc etc. The options are endless.

I'd welcome some views on this strategy, especially if people have tried it for themselves.

Also, I'm not really interested in the mobile market, so if anyone wants to make me an offer on the n77.co.uk domain, feel free to email me.

Here's some resources you might like to check out:

• Scriptol
• 1st Search Enginge Rankings
• WebProWorld
• SEOMoz
• Google Analytics Blog