Top SEO blog posts of 2008!

These are my top blog posts of 2008. I’ve included posts on different subjects to keep it varied and interesting! Have a browse and take in the big SEO stories of 2008. Well the ones I’ve found interesting are here, if you have seen any *really* good ones, add a link in the comments!

SEO Jobs
Richard Baxter’s complete guide to getting a job in SEO is aimed at beginners but some of the information and links will be useful to even the more experienced of SEO’s. It is the most recent and most comprehensive guide on getting an SEO job I’ve seen and beats most of the generic advice you find on recruitment sites. Get a job in SEO!

Conspiracy theories
Consistently good blog with affiliate and black hat advice. I always like looking at the affiliate marketing blogs as they always seem to have good technical tips. This article outlines the incredible breadth of information Google gathers from users. While this is quite a frightening prospect, you can see why Google is such a profitable company, being able to target very specific demographics with relevant adverts is great for marketers and the end user. The high valuation of social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo and Myspace is mostly down to the huge amount of information they can collect legitimately. Google has its fingers in so many more pies than social networking though, and this is why it will always know a scary amount of information about you, the user!

Usability blog post
This great post from SEOmoz, simply points out that links should look like links. While this might seem like stating the obvious, links have changed appearance a lot with Flash and CSS.Take a look at a hard-line usability website, and you’ll find a site that seemingly, has not been redesigned since 1995. The site makes use of very normal looking links and has always stuck to the blue/purple coloured link system. I’d probably want to run a few multivariate tests to check that any radical colour combinations work for your particular site. Find out how to make a link look like a link!

Affiliate blog post
While this post is from 2006 I only found it earlier this year. It struck me as a quite a good idea, use your business/personal blog as a way to organise an online poker event and include affiliate links to your poker site of choice. This helps network with your visitors and other blog friends while earning you a bit of cash too. Seems like a no-brainer!

WTF 1!
Probably one of the most entertaining SEO videos I’ve seen all year, no offence to SEOmoz who also post SEO videos, but this is far funnier than whiteboard Friday!

Content is king
This post is an attempt to find out an actual figure to measure duplicate content. Google always stated it "wanted to reward good behaviour rather than penalise bad".
For this reason Google will never release info on their duplicate content guidelines, they don't want us to design content to a minimum specification, they want content to be as good, and as useful as possible. Imagine if there was no quality control, spam would reign and no one would use the Internet because all they would find would be shoddy content. At least they try to reward great content!

WTF 2!
One of my favourite posts this year from The Register. It describes the inner workings of a new high tech search engine, its employees and why, without considerable amounts of Strawberries and Muffins, the new search engine would fail in its quest to dominate the “quantum porn” search niche. Find out more about this new fangled search engine!

Merry Xmas and have a Happy New Year!
I hope you all continue to read my blog, have a great Christmas and a happy new year, whether you are an SEO, Webmaster or Web designer, have a great 2009!I have some great new posts on the way, so add me to your RSS reader!

Affiliates XL at selling holidays

A friend of mine booked a holiday this summer to a resort in Spain. He spoke about how he'd enjoyed his time and how he'd booked online. (This was all prior to the recent XL closure and all the panic in the travel industry). He mentioned the name of the company and asked me how and why they could sell holidays online without a shop.

I casually searched the company and found the site, and as I went into an oft repeated speech about the cost benefits and secure transactions available to users online, I discovered the site was actually an affiliate website. The smug expression on my face went as soon as I saw all the affiliate links.

Noticing my sudden silence, my friend asked what was wrong… Well, nothing really, I’d just found an affiliate site that did a really good job of letting a user search and find a suitable holiday without the site looking like a complete mess of spam links and “optimised” copy about cheap flights and holidays to Florida. This site looked like the product of a good design and development team, and not something penned by Stevie Wonder with the input of a khazakstan based usability consultant called Borat. I was even more shocked to realise my friend had bought via the affiliate too. (I’d heard of travel and holiday affiliates generating serious money, but I was never totally convinced. This might be because affiliate marketing still hasn’t shaken off its dodgy spam image, even though it generated over £3b of sales last year in the UK alone.)

This brings me onto the importance of the function and interactions you offer users on your site. What struck me about the affiliate site was that there was functionality that benefited the user rather than endless amounts of copy sprinkled with some SEO links and affiliate tracking links. They have probably realised faster than several big name companies, that having a webpage with an actual purpose and use for a user is about as good as a well SEO'd site.

The intelligent affiliate sites worked out long ago that they were not the experts on travel, so why try to compete with Thomson on that front? Play to your own strengths, that’s what they say. Their strength was in SEO/web design and online marketing and so on. So they focused on where they could be superior to Thomson, that brought about innovations like interactive maps, RSS deal feeds and so on.

I have always thought that an affiliate site needs to compete in a different area to add value. Instead of competing with them, the affiliate should be looking at where their client is weak and targeting that area. The affiliates that do this usually have the sites you find and actually use instead of just being dazzled by the "optimised" copy.

A footnote to XL holidays
This must be quite a frustrating read for ex-employees of XL travel, it seems the only winners in travel at the moment are the very big brands and the travel businesses that are small and don’t depend on the volatile fuel market (affiliates and partners for example). They can survive the current storm surrounding the travel industry. The other smaller brands will be viewed as a high stakes gamble by the customer, and many more will go bust.

How low can the airlines go before they begin to run at a loss? Can Ryanair and EasyJet run anymore efficiently and make profits?

Plenty of websites will get some serious traffic from the flurry of searches for “XL”. Most companies in this area have brand pages that have optimised text to pick up searches for their ex-competitors brand terms.

The fast acting sites are usually the ones that understand the web best in any industry.It’s probably the cheapest and most efficient way to get passengers, so I imagine seeing a few offline agents being shut down and the money being invested where it works harder.

Affiliate Marketing for beginners (Me)...

I have no experience of affiliate marketing whatsover, but I'm constructing a new website purely for affiliate purposes. I'm going to throw myself into it and see what happens. I'll post the details of this site on here once it's done.

Thin Affiliates
I've researched various areas on affiliate marketing and it would seem that site quality is very important. I've heard people talk of cutting commission paid to low quality affiliate sites that add no value to the users journey. As well as this, the 2005 Google report on "Thin Affiliates" made it clear that Google doesn't want poor affiliate sites clogging up their SERPs (A common strategy with affiliate websites).

This increasing pressure to design well laid out and good quality affiliate sites will put a lot of less skilled affiliates out of business. I'm not too hot on the whole affiliate business myself, but I won't have any trouble coming up with a high quality website with good usable SEO'd content.

I don't think this is bad news for affiliates at all, it just improves the overall quality of sites and actually adds value, rather than adding spam! The same goes for dodgy Adsense sites, this is a great way to earn commission and Google does all the hard work. All you need is a website with great content (an area you are interested about always helps). There is always room for a great website with a unique content offering, whether you are a life coach, a managing director or an addictive games designer, people will always be interested in specialist areas.

Content is King!
I think this is an important point when you set out to design an affiliate website because there are so many affiliate programs, you will always be able to find one suitable for your content. I would focus on developing great content on a subject you are experienced and knowledgeable on. Then find an affiliate program to suit it. If you can't find suitable programs on Commission Junction and Affiliate Future etc, you can always use Adsense, I think it's content sensitive targeted adverts are fantastic and you can filter out competing sites.

Affiliate marketing: The Basics
From what I've read so far, Affiliate marketing requires good web design, good SEO and great content with some functionality to help engage users. I have a suitable background to develop websites in this way, I just need to find my niche!

Post links to any great affiliate sites and I'll take a look at them!

Case Studies
My next post will be the start of a series of case studies. I will be investigating the online marketing of current company websites and analysing their effectiveness and how they could improve, so add my RSS feed so you don't miss out on this free content!

Green Light Webinar

I've been listening to a few of the Green Light Webinars. The last was on link building. Entitled "Link Building, the good bad and ugly" the webinar focused on link building issues and brought up a few interesting ideas including link networks and link building velocity.

The webinar was well put together and very informative, although initially delayed because of a technical hitch, I'm glad I waited around as the content was very good and very current. The main points I took away from this, were the following:

Link building
1. Speed of link accruel, so instead of considering the total number of links, look at how many links you get over a given period and try to increase this rate.

Controlling and maximising Links
2. Look for intelligent ways to boost the power of your links. Use "No follow" tags on links that go to pages like terms and conditions and privacy pages. These are not going to generate relevant traffic to your site, so why waste link power to these pages? Instead channel the power to all your primary traffic generating pages and nofollow any others.
Look at current inbound links, like those from affiliates. Instead of having their links go through third party sites and losing any link power, track referrals yourself and benefit from more in links. This will require trust with your affiliates and accurate tracking software, but is worth considering.

Natural anchor text
3. Try to keep the anchor text of any bought links looking natural and not the same keyword repeated over and over eg"Bankloans".

Link building widgets
4. Look at making "widgets" (a useful web based application) to allow others to add functionality to their blog. This widget will need to be relevant to your business area, and include a link to your site.

I hope you can benefit from this information as much as I have, I found the webinar a very good use of time!