Back in October we began our Ask An Affiliate Manager blog series, offering free tips and advice for affiliates. We then began with a question on the Best Sources of Traffic in Affiliate Marketing, where we explored some preferred methods for driving traffic. Today we continue our blog series, with the question: How can my website rank higher in Google?

So you’ve built a website and dedicated hours to writing helpful and interesting information for your visitor. But the traffic just isn’t pouring in as you hoped. This may be because you have not optimized your site with targeted keywords, resulting in a low search engine ranking, and making it difficult for visitors to reach your website.

In order to rank well in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines, it is vital that you optimize your website for targeted keywords and keyword phrases. Keyword phrases are the words that internet users type into search engines to find needed information. Search engines then display the search results by using spider searches to locate websites that best match the keywords used. If your keywords are not targeted, you risk ranking low in these search engines.  Search engines look for particular items when calculating your page rank. Below are some helpful tips to ensure you’ve optimized your website for targeted keywords.

Title Tag– The Title Tag is by far the most fundamental SEO tag for your site.  Your targeted keywords or key phrases should be highlighted in the Title Tag of your page. Include your primary keyword at the start, followed by your secondary keyword. Ideally, these Title Tags should be between 10-60 characters.

Meta Tags
Meta Description Tag – This is an important tag for every page on your site. The description tag should explain what your website is about and contain roughly 200 characters. As a general rule of thumb you should take the first sentence or two from your body tag and use this for your meta description tag. Make sure that your targeted keywords are found in the Meta Description Tag.

Meta Keyword Tag- Although not all “crawlers” support the Meta Keyword Tag, it is still helpful to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index. This tag can also be useful to help support the terms on a page you think is important. For example, if you have a page about winter boots and use the words “winter boots” several times in your body content – then using the words “winter boots” in your Meta Keyword Tag may help increase your page rank.

Content – It’s imperative to make sure your targeted keywords and keyword phrases are found multiple times within the content on your site, particularly the homepage. It is also a good idea to bold targeted keywords.

Link Building - Once you've optimized your website for targeted keywords, you’ll need to start building links to increase your chance of ranking well. Inbound links are a crucial component to achieving success in website rankings.

What do you think?  Have you found these tips useful?  Would you like to ask an affiliate manager a question? Let us know by leaving your comments below!