GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 19 - February 2012

nied by Google’s “translate this page” links? – The presence of these results is an indica- tor of a very soft market; they most often appear as English content. S tep 4 – Pick a keyword I always like to say that “picking a keyword is picking a fight; don’t pick a fight unless you’re sure you can win!” Tackling unknown markets can make this defensive thinking problematic. So it becomesmore an issue of riskmanagement. This article is about tackling major iGaming SERPs on a shoestring budget. It’s worth not- ing that with a diverse link mix you can rank upper page one in certain markets with as few as six to 23 links for killer single-keyword que- ries. It requires an exact-match domain and a perfectly balanced link profile. S tep 5 – Buy a domain I’ve never been much of a domainer; buying domains at the right price is a specialist field of its own. Whenever I buy domains, I usually buy them at £10 based on what is available. All the best domains are taken, right? Wrong! IDNs (International Domain Names) open up the possibility for the use of diacritical charac- ters (accents) and foreign characters such as Cyrillic. Google appears to take these accents into account when determining the SERPs for any given query that contains them. Guess what? They look shitty, but Google loves them. They’re encoded using Punycode and can be bought from a number of reliable reg- istrars. This Punycode converter will show how the domains are decoded and encoded: http://www.charset.org/punycode.php Note: the French don’t use accents when que- rying Google due to the position on the key- board. However, the Germans, Scandinavians and Spanish do use their respective accents when querying search engines. S tep 6 – Get hosting When kicking off your embryonic affiliate busi- ness, you don’t need expensive servers. I opted for relatively cheap virtual hosting. I’m target- ing international markets using neutral (.org & .net) domains and haven’t even set up geo- targeting in webmaster tools, yet everything is ranking perfectly. The neutral domains are ranking due to language and local targeted links and the local TLDs are ranking based on language and the TLD’s country. My conclusion here is that much nonsense is propagated by SEOs. Many of the link orders which come to Media Skunk Works are riddled with dogma. This belief that strict local TLD or GEO IP criteriamust be adhered to is in practice unnecessary. Example: I took a Chilean TLD, built a site, linked it up with Spanish-language links on Spanish-language sites all hosted in France . . . and boom! Page 1 for Tragaperras in under 14 days. So don’t believe the hype, folks. S tep 7 – Get a logo This step can be bypassed if you want to save even moremoney. However, one place you can get cheap logo design done is at 99designs.com, or you can look for designers on Elance.com or Odesk.com. S tep 8 – Get a site designed You can find great Web designers on Odesk.com although you do take your chances – the quality will vary, and be careful when choosing a designer for the Web. Your logo designer may not be a CSS guy, but rather a print media specialist, and his or her site design may need additional work when it gets converted into code and CSS. S tep 9 – Get a site built I prefer my sites to be built in Drupal, but WordPress is also very popular and versatile, once customized with an easy-to-navigate theme. You’re also in a position to replicate and rebrand the first installation. I use a multi-do- main installation of Drupal, which means I can have hundreds of sites running from the same file structure with their own databases. This ap- proach enables me to scale rapidly. S tep 10 – Write content Many agencies talk about “content being king.” The first two sites I ranked with this approach had only a single optimized holding page. They both ranked page one for their primary keyword. Again, don’t believe the hype. One page, 300 words will be enough to get you rolling on day one. You can find great local-language writers, re- searchers and translators on Odesk.com and Elance.com. Always use local native speakers, ideally with iGaming backgrounds. S tep 11 – Get links You need links! Buy 15 in the first round and use these anchor variations. • One-third to contain your target keyword as part of the phrase • One-third to contain the domain name/ home-page URL (e.g., http://example.com , example.com, www.example.com , etc.) • One-third to contain neither the home-page URL/domain nor the target keyword (Click here, Visit site, etc.) Link exchanges also work very well. Don’t buy into the myth that reciprocal links negate each other. This is SEO folk law, which stems from a filter which was applied to deal with directories which accrued PageRank via free listing in ex- change for a link. At the recent Barcelona Affiliate Conference I launched the #BAClink hashtag as a way for affili- ates to collaborate and reciprocate links. I strong- ly advise using this as a method for collaboration. Just tweet the products and territories where you have affiliate websites, along with #BAClink, and share the love. (Only your money sites – no artificially inflated PR or link farms. Let’s keep this pure!) Example: ….and meet like-minded partners in link love to share the juice with. Do it! NOW! Summary It’s actually easier than you might think. The only thing preventing you from building a suc- cessful affiliate business is YOU! Get on with it! Experiment! There’s no real bar- rier to entry, so get involved. Remember... • Don’t let your quest for perfection get in the way of progress. • Jump in, have fun! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . If you have any specific questions e-mail me directly at paul@mediaskunkworks.com or follow me on http://twitter.com/paulreilly or stalk me on http://foursquare.com/user/paulreilly 51