SEO tactics and updates from A4U Expo

SEO Tactics for affiliates
One of the most important issues is to get massive amounts of content without getting a “penalty” because it’s duplicated. Datafeeds are used to promote thousands of products and affiliates like to use them therefore. But using the same datafeeds as your competitors would create duplicate content, no relevancy and your rankings get screwed. Note: you don’t get a “penalty” for “using” duplicate content.

So what should you do in order to avoid screwed rankings? Google has 2 ways in order to check if you have a great and relevant site for its users.  What is important to think about if you want to promote a large set of products. Google will use its algorithm and use its human quality raters. But creating this content by yourself would be quite hard. Some tips of Tom Critchlow:

1. Try to make your content unique and use “semi-unique” content. Try to dynamically insert content with an standardized text.
2. Use reviews to get manually user generated content
3. Think of hiring freelancers to do the work. Check platforms like Mechanical Turk, Elance and Odesk.
4. Scrape parts of content from different websites. You could use the tool Mozenda for example.
5. Make use of user generated “content” like providing a list of external and internal search queries, tags, testimonials, list with popular articles, FAQ’s etc.
6. If you use a datafeed try to have a unique page title while most of the affiliates use the proposed names within the feeds.
7. Define keyword niches and try to use it within your site structure (category names, page names, internal anchor texts etc.)
8. Try to avoid pagination
9. Don’t use your footer for internal spam linking. You could better use tactic 5 instead. Over-optimization is wrong. At Yahoo some sites have been banned for this.
10. Use separated XML sitemaps for your site and check them within Google webmaster tools. A well structured overview works and you tend to find problems faster.

SEO updates: What’s new?
What a killer presentation. After a good Baverian night, Marcus Tandler (a German super affiliate) started the SEO morning session. Without fixing his hair after the rough party last night, his fantastic energy and enthusiasm have been a great wake-up call for us all. He explained us what a great variable CTR is. It’s been recently applied to the statistics at Google Webmaster Tools and that’s a great opportunity to start working with it. Google has its algorithm and with CTR they are able to “ask” its users what they think about a website.

You properly have seen before that one of your websites bounced from position 9 till 11 within a certain period. What happens is that Google tries to find out if your website is front page material. What you should do is to optimize your meta-description (snippet).

Besides optimizing your snippet you could also think about optimizing your images for universal search. Google image search is a rising star, tends to grow and send more traffic. Optimizing images isn’t that hard as regular SEO, according to Andre Alpar (online marketing consultant of Rocket Internet). He have done a small survey and SEO experts tend to use a max of 30 ranking factors to look for. Downside of the story is that it’s hard to prove when images would appear. You’ll find images when you search on personas, animals etc. but not when somebody tries to get a mortgage.