I have been lucky enough to be involved in affiliate marketing, PPC, and other marketing segments in the past few years. What I have realized is most affiliate marketers don’t pay enough attention to the ABCs of SEO. In other words, they don’t get the basics straight and go in expecting to get ranked on top search engines regardless. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen monumental affiliate sites that do not have optimized title tags. The concept behind these sites are great, but if you forget the most important SEO tactics, you are not going to get ranked as well as you should.

A lot of affiliates argue that SEO is not their “cup of tea.” That they are good with marketing, but not with the technical “stuff.” In reality, you don’t need to be a super geek to be able to implement the basics of SEO. Advanced SEO often requires some technical knowledge but even that shouldn’t be an issue if you have the drive to learn (There are plenty of sources such as AffiloRama that can teach you how to implement advance SEO tactics).

In order to achieve higher traffic from organic search, you should at least take time to do the bare minimum. In essence, you should be prepared to:

• do proper keyword research before setting up your affiliate site. Choosing the right keywords can bring you lots of targeted traffic and who doesn’t want that.
• optimize your website tags (including title, meta, alt, header, and robots) in order to give yourself a better chance of getting ranked high on search engines.
• optimize your website structure (URLs, file names, and directory names) to get the most out of your content.
• optimize your sitemap and robots.txt files to help engines find your pages, and  reduce content duplication issues.
• feed your website with fresh, optimized content in order to keep search agents coming back for more.
• use the social media to drive extra traffic to your website (through providing valuable content to your readers).
• optimize your website linking structure (internal links) to help Google understand the theme(s) within your site.
• gather incoming links (inbound links) from article directories, web directories, blogs, forums, and other sources.

The above steps are a general blue-print on how to optimize an affiliate site for the search engines. Most of the above steps do not require you to be a super geek, which means there should be no excuse for you not to do them. Are you getting the most organic traffic out of your affiliate sites?

That’s the most burning question that people who are new to search engine optimization often ask. “How can I get up to speed with SEO fast!” That’s really the nature of the game. People who don’t know anything about search engine optimization don’t want to waste their time reading multiple books and training packages to come up to speed. It takes time and is not the best way of using your time to read the same things over and over again. So I am going to use this post to talk about how I would go about learning Search Engine Optimization:

• Read Books: SEO books may not be as important as they used to be. The industry is too volatile now to get a snapshot of it in a book. Having said that, books are getting updated every 6 months or a year. You should at least get a new SEO book every quarter to read on the new topics. Of course, if you are a SEO pro, you can keep up with the latest developments with blogs, forums, and so on, but if you are VP of marketing and just want to know enough to be dangerous, books are the way to go (SEO Bible is currently the one SEO book that is updated with social media and other new developments in the industry).
• Read Blogs: there are not many SEO blogs out there for beginners, but you can use blogs such as “search engine watch” to keep up with the latest developments in the industry. You may not understand everything that is going on, but you wouldn’t look baffled when someone talks about, let’s say, “local” search.
• Advanced Training: a lot of SEO gurus used to have books, white-papers, and things of that nature for those who were interested in SEO training. Guys like Aaron Walls created digital SEO training packages that were much more comprehensive and cutting edge than ordinary books. But they also understood the nature of industry, so that’s why we see membership sites such as SEO Book and Immediate Edge. I would focus on these training packages after reading a book or two on SEO. These are not for everyone but those who want to stay on the edge of the search industry.
• Seminars/In-class Training: Bruce Clay and SEMPO both have in class training and certification program for SEO. Once again, these are not for everyone as they are expensive. Having said that, a lot of people prefer going to seminars such as SES to learn things than actually taking time to read up on stuff.
• Paid Subscriptions: I talked about subscription-based training courses (e.g. SEOBook) above. But sites such as SEOmoz offer subscription based information (similar to Economist’s service). You get the latest industry analysis and premium news using such services. If you can afford it, these sites are worth looking at.
• SEO In Practice: practice makes perfect, and one way to do that is by buying a software package such as Web Position or SEO-Elite. These packages have comprehensive manuals that show you how to do things with practice (given with their software). I personally learned a lot of what I know from playing with these software packages.

As you can see by now, there is no short-cut in this process. It does take time, and if you don’t know anything, it will take even more time. But reading a book usually is the fastest way to get your feet wet in the SEO industry.

Just heard the news that Dan Raine and co are going to upgrade the immediate edge program. The immediate edge program is an advanced online marketing community that discusses the latest developments on the Web  such as FaceBook marketing, Google Slaps, and …. You can find out more about the immediate edge program here but don’t even bother if you are a beginner.