jwanchalkThe SEO Game is Changing
The following is a guest post from Kevin (or KevinMcC at the forums) who runs this NFL Betting Picks site amongst others.
With recent Google updates it is pretty clear that the Search Engine Optimization “game” is changing.
The Internet is evolving and so are the big search engines. The algorithms seem to be changing quite a bit and often to adapt to the new social media driven Internet, and affiliates are going to need to adapt to the new changes if they want to be successful.
Although SEO is mostly guesswork, below are a few factors that I think the search engines (Google) are taking into consideration now a day.
Time On Site, Page Views, Bounce Rate, Repeat Visits
To get rid of spam it seems that Google might be taking a look at how long visitors are engaged on a website. It makes sense to me. Google wants to have high quality and “expert” type websites high in their search results. Spammy sites will have a ton of people leaving very shortly after arriving, while the higher quality sites will often keep people reading and engaged.
I am guessing that this may only play a small role in the rankings because high quality web pages can provide a detailed answer to a search query, resulting in the searcher leaving the site after finding their answer.
I have a few suggestions for increasing your visitor’s time on site, page views and decreasing your bounce rate.
The first thing to do would be taking advantage of interlinking your articles. Don’t go too crazy with interlinking, but anytime you have a article relevant to a phrase used in an article on your website you should be linking to it.
Another tip is linking out to similar articles at the bottom of each article on your website. Something like “If you enjoyed this article you might also enjoy…” would do the trick.
Lastly the most obvious suggestion is to write quality content. If your visitors enjoy what they’ve read they will keep reading on. An example might be one of the sports betting strategy articles that I had Jim write for my main site. The content is unbelievable to the point that I’ve had users thanking me and asking for more. The reader gets to the end of the article and wants more immediately. As you can see in the article I have a link to three more articles by Jim at the bottom of so that the user can continue on.
I’m unsure how much these factors play into the rankings, but it only makes sense that they do.
Social Media Presence
Facebook and Twitter are absolute huge these days. Although links from Facebook and Twitter may be no follow I am pretty sure that Google recognizes these types of links. If someone clicks through from Facebook.com or Twitter.com to your website Google should be able to register that information.
Google is giving Brands a boost in the SERP’s and a lot of the websites who are using Facebook and Twitter are brands. If you are getting visits from these social media websites you may be seen as a quality site, authority site, or a brand, and may get a boost in the SERPs.
Even without the possible search ranking factor, I highly recommend affiliates building up a social media presence for free (or paid if you choose) traffic.
With Facebook create a “fan page” and under the “info” tab have a solid write up about what your company/website does. The more content here the better, and then include a link back to your website.
With Twitter you can create an account using your website name (or as close as it as you can get) and then include a quick description of your website and put your URL in the website field.
You can’t ignore Facebook and Twitter forever – they are becoming the most visited websites on the web.
Page Load Times
With what seems like half of the world browsing on 3G mobile networks it seems as if Google is going to give fast loading websites a boost in the SERPs. Nothing is worse then searching for something on your smart phone in Google only to have the page take way too long to load.
Google wants their visitors to be happy, and slow loading sites do not make for happy searchers.
How do you make your website load faster?
Ensure you have clean code (if you are like me and aren’t good at knowing what is clean or not ask someone on the forums), limit your plug-ins if you’re on wordpress, limit the amount of images used on your pages, and using caching if you can.
I’m not an expert with this stuff, but you can search the Internet and find some good articles on how to make your website load faster.
Although nothing is certain in the SEO world, the factors mentioned in this post are most likely used by Google and other big search engines, and affiliates will need to adapt to ensure good rankings and the end goal – money in the bank.
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