Steve, who sent me a query about affiliate chicken and egg syndrome a while back
has come back with a follow up question about blogging from an SEO point of view. I thought it was a pretty good question, so Steve’s agreed that everyone should get the benefit of my answer.

Here’s what Steve asked :-

“Just wanted to take you up on the offer of helping me with ideas for blog posts from an SEO point of view. I was going to do one for Jackpot Joy if you remember, but I’ve just posted the following article reviewing a brand new affiliate program that I’m heavily involved with called uVme.biz.

Any suggestions on the style of writing or improvements that could be made for SEO purposes?”

Hello Steve!

Your post is good in writing style, but it isn’t so strong on the SEO front. It’s very general in nature, and probably won’t capture much in the way of niche search terms. You have to think a certain may (well, I do anyhow!!) to write a post specifically for the search engines. Of course, there are many other ways to generate blog traffic.. but I shall get to that later on. In the meantime, here is my mini guide to getting your head round the SEO part of the gig!

Ok, to write a good blog post for the search engines you have to sort of start backwards. First, get your subject areas. Then you have to place yourself in the position of your target market and try to work out how they think. Finally, you work out how they would behave within a search engine if they wanted to find out information about the product or service you’re trying to push.

I am going to assume that you are looking to target and recruit affiliates for this programme. OK, so you are looking to attract people who are affiliates, people who are interested in making money online, and possibly bloggers looking for a source of monetisation. I usually try to work out how I could target an article to appeal to one (or more unusually) all of these groups, or a small area of interest within one of those groups that would be easy to rank for.

So off the top of my head, I’d then come up with some post titles that would capture the search terms I think these groups of people might use. For example: -

Make Money Online With New Social Networking Site
Monetise Your Blog - Paid Signups On New Social Networking Site
Social Networking Affiliate Programme - UVMe’s New Opportunity

You might also try to cash in on some searches for competing sites: -

Make Money Online With New Facebook Competitor
Bloggers Monetise The FaceBook Generation

I then write a post which I think contains the information these groups would be looking for if they were searching for this information. I also keep in mind that I should include the search terms, plus related terms (Pseudonyms) throughout the text. However, you shouldn’t load the text with unnatural looking search terms. It puts the reader off and Google also actively looks out for pages engaging in keyword stuffing, and can impose penalties on sites naughty enough to be doing it.

So long as you keep it natural looking, and basically make sure every paragraph is relevant to your title subject, you’re doing the right thing.

I would also usually recommend you do a bit of search term research to determine what kind of information within your subject area is being searched for. However, as I’ve never heard of this kind of affiliate programme before, I checked search terms and found little or no clues as to how I might structure a post based on current search behaviour.

Blogs always tend to attract a lot of “long tail” search terms from people looking for very specific information anyway. A lack of search terms does not necessarily mean a lack of traffic, so don’t be put off by that.

As for other traffic generators, you can get quite a fair bit of traffic out of these various blog syndication sites if you write a reasonable title and include genuinely useful information. Services such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Bumpzee etc can provide good traffic. I’ve had the odd really good day or two on my blog when I write something folks really do like! Also, signing up to blog directories can be a source of incoming links and a wee bit of traffic.

I hope this post was helpful to a few people. I must say it was actually quite hard for me to write down how I think when it comes to SEO. I have been working in SEO for so long much of it happens without me thinking about it, so it’s hard to set out my process exactly.

If you’ve got any kind of question you’d like to ask of an experienced affiliate marketer that you don’t mind being published, please drop me a wee line. I think it’s really useful to all the newbie readers and would love to answer some more to provide a good resource for people just starting out.

If you’ve found my information useful, do please consider giving the blog a bit of link love… you’ll feel better for it!