Ok, so following on from the last post. Our site (http://free-photo-prints.co.uk) has now been visited and indexed by Google. The site alone with no real inbound links (other than the 2 mentioned in the other post) has acheived a search engine position of about 230 for the term “free photo prints” (without quotes). If I search for the exact term “free photo prints” (with quotes) it is showing at about position 55.
It would seem I’ve got some work to do…
I’ve created a simple site to experiment with SEO. I ummed and arghed over which niche/vertical to target and in the end chose a simple idea I’ve had on my todo list for a while.
The site I’ve created is http://free-photo-prints.co.uk. It’s a simple 1 page site listing photo printing companies offering free introductory offers. I realise this is nothing new or exciting and there a 1001 other sites out there doing exactly the same which I will be competing with. But the aim of this exercise is not to create a site to make money but to experiment with onsite and offsite SEO and see how far up the SERPs I can get.
I used the International Keyword Suggestion Tool availble from SEOBook.com to decide which keyword(s) to target. In the end I chose “free photo prints” as it appeared to have more searches per month that some of the others and more importantly there were also a couple of sites already high in the SERPs optimised for this keyword.
I feel the fact that there are already sites there optimised for my chosen keyword will be useful for 2 reasons.
- I can see how they have optimised their sites for the keyword and how many backlinks they have gained, etc.
- I’ll feel like I’ve acheived something when/if I’m at position 1 in Google for this keyword.
On site SEO
I’ve put the main keyword (free photo prints) in both the <title> tag and wrapped in <h1> tags at the beginning of my <body> text.
I’ve written the content of the site from scratch ensuring the main keyword is used fairly often throughout. I’ve also used the keyword a few more times in the alt elements of the <image> tags.
So…time to get indexed and see where the site appears in Google for just the onsite optimisation. I’ll leave the offsite stuff until a little later. I’ve created links to my new site at craiglist.org and gumtree in order to get them indexed fairly quickly. I believe I read somewhere that these were two good sites to use for this (if I remember where I’ll link to it).
So we’ll sit and wait for Google to visit.
So, a little background about me, who I am and my experiences with Affiliate Marketing so far.
I’ve been attempting to make some money from AM for about a year. Up until now all of my campaigns have been PPC (Pay per Click) based using Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search & Microsoft’s PPC offering. What I would like to do now is focus upon some SEO based campaigns to run along side my PPC campaigns.
I come from a programming background and decided to use PHP for the majority of my sites since it’s so widely supported by hosting companies. I’d never touched PHP before, but found it very easy to pick up since there is so much online help and examples available.
The world of SEO is very new to me. I’m reading as much as I can about it but I think it’s got to the point where I won’t learn any more unless I put some of it to practice and learn from my mistakes. I’ve got 1001 ideas for sites and niches I’d like to promote; my only problem is finding the time to develop these ideas.
So time to get stuck into some work and see what happens.
What to write about?
Hopefully many more postings to come regarding my successes and failures with Affiliate Marketing. Maybe in time this blog will start to contain some really useful hints, tips and suggestions to help other people along their way with affiliate marketing. Or maybe I’ll lose interest in this blog pretty quickly and no one will ever read it….I guess time will tell.