Welcome to the fourth post in the series of Earning Money through Amazon Associates. If you haven’t read the third post read it here: http://qadirmemon.com/2011/09/earning-money-through-amazon-associates-part-3/

I’m very sorry that as usual I couldn’t update the blog for such a long time, no excuses this time so let’s directly move forward to the post.

Just to refresh some minds regarding the steps we are following for our Earn Money through Amazon Associates series, I’ve mentioned the steps below.

Sign up for Amazon Associates.
Choose a product.
Find keywords.
Register a domain.
Make a website.
Do on-site SEO
Do off-site SEO
Get ranked and make sales.
We covered the points up to Make a Website in the previous posts and I hope by now you all have your Amazon accounts approved and products short-listed.

So what will we cover today?

On Site SEO

On Site SEO is one of the most important aspects when operating your website because it’s the structure on which you’re Off Site SEO will depend on. If your structure isn’t stable and strong chances are your Off Site SEO attempts will fail as well.

I’ll try to keep things simple and not over burden you with information. Please understand On Site SEO is a very big field and can’t be covered in one post. I’ll post whatever I feel is necessary for you to start working and will be posting other techniques for On Site SEO as time goes.

Title

The title of your website matters a lot and if you don’t want to get a penalty, you need to keep it simply and user-friendly as well as Google-friendly. This is the place where you get to describe your whole website/business in about 10-15 words. I am not saying you should not put keywords in there. Quite the opposite – put your most important keywords in the title but make sure you put them in a way that is not spammy looking instead of just stuffing them and separating them with commas.

Tips

When writing your website title, be creative and don’t repeat anything more than once. For example, if you are selling silver and gold jewelry, writing “Silver jewelry, gold jewelry…” in your title is not a good idea. Instead use the phrase “Silver and gold jewelry”. You should know that Google doesn’t care about the order of the words and you will get credit for each permutation.

The H1 and H2 Texts

The H1 and H2 Texts are highly important – Why? They show the search engine the main subjects and Table of Contents for the content to be indexed. Make them keyword friendly and reflective of your page’s title tag.

Meta Tags

The Meta Keywords, Description and Robots tag — Google used description copy to market your site in its results, treat this as optimized sales copy. Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines. Although not as important as they used to be but still these are something that must be on your page and must be optimized.

Keyword Density

Keyword Density — 8% is excellent and doesn’t seem spammy, if you have a 500 word article, then 40 of those words should have variances of the search term you are targeting, if this seems excessive, lower the keyword density down to 5% and you will only need to add 25 variances/instances of your keyword.

IMG Alt Tags

IMG Alt Tags — Your images should be described via ALT Tags with the keywords you are optimizing for – If your image is hosted on your web-host, the file name of the images should also be SEO’d — If you have an image about Haier Refrigerators have it be haier-refrigrator.jpg in your images folder.

Sitemap.xml

Sitemaps are a very important factor you shouldn’t miss. Many plugins are available to create sitemaps automatically.

Google Webmaster Tools

Validate your website to the Google’s Webmaster Tools as its one of the best thing Google offers for Webmasters. It will show you almost everything you need to perfect your Website’s ranking. It will show Errors, Problems Google Crawler Is Facing etc.

Robots.txt

Please ensure you have created a Robots.txt file as per your requirements and is present on your website.

XHTML/W3C Validation

Try to get your website XHTML/W3C Validated to make sure errors aren’t present on your website, the less errors it contains the better.

URL Structure

URL Structure is also a very important step. Make sure your website isn’t generating Dynamic URLS instead Keyword Rich Static URLS. In WORDPRESS Goto Settings -> Permalinks to choose these options.

Canonical URL Issues

If you can access your site by typing “site.com” and “www.site.com”, Google will see that as two different sites with the exact same content and that can hurt you a lot for Duplicate Content. You need to create a file called .htaccess with these three lines and put it in the root folder of your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.site\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Warning: unless you know what you’re doing, have someone else do this. All servers are configured different and you don’t want to mess with your .htaccess file.

I hope all the above information wasn’t much hard to understand?

Just go to www.google.com and type in “On Site SEO Tips” and you’ll get tons of articles. Study, Study and Study until you feel comfortable and then start working on your first website.

Until next time that’s all for now,

Take Care,

AQM