SEO and affiliate marketing

An affiliate marketing business will not yield a profitable result when an individual does not address the concern of making it accessible to potential clients and customers on the Web. Having a site alone is not a guarantee that consumers can pick it up using search engines; in fact, your site is like a needle in a very large haystack -- making it hard for your potential customers to dig it up on the Web.

A solution to this problem is to implement SEO or search engine optimization. SEO offers concepts that will increase a website's online coverage by making it compatible with search engine look-up. This is considered to be a sound business strategy for affiliate marketing enterprise on the Internet.

The aim of SEO is to increase online coverage to improve a site's traffic. The more people that can access your site that sports your business niche, the higher the profit yields would be.

The first step to implementing SEO on your affiliate marketing business is to design your site to increase its overall appeal. Even if you improve its placement in search engine results, it will not be productive on your end if your visitors won't like what they see in it. Design your site according to your business niche, and incorporate layout for easy navigation from your online visitors.

After you've given your website a complete physical makeover, you can now start implementing SEO to increase its search engine coverage -- starting with keywords.

Keywords are considered to be the core of SEO. Since search engines utilize keywords keyed in the by user to look for information on the Web, you need to come up with a list of keywords or key phrases that reflects your product and services. Place these keywords on specific areas of your site, including:

• Title area
• Meta description (site description)
• Headers and links
• Content of your website

Once you have incorporated keywords into your site without compromising its overall content, you can now start increasing your page rank to increase your placement in search engine results; and this can be achieve through the use of links.

The more links on the Web that points back to your site, the higher your page rank would be. You can implement link building strategies with other sites related to your business, start with social networking or bookmarking strategies, or even come up with articles with embedded links and publish them on the Web. Putting up a link of your site in Internet directories is also a good idea to increase your page rank.

banner ad objective

Advertisers generally hope a banner ad will do one of two things. Ideally, a visitor to the publisher site, the Web site that posts the banner ad, will click on the banner ad and go to the advertiser's Web site. In this case the banner ad has brought the advertiser a visitor they would not have had otherwise. The banner ad is a real success if the visitor not only comes to the site but also buys something. Failing a click-through, advertisers hope that a publisher site visitor will see the banner ad and will somehow register it in their heads. This could mean the visitor consciously notes the content of a banner ad and decides to visit the advertiser's site at some time in the future, or it might mean that the visitor only peripherally picks up on the ad but is made aware of the advertiser's product or service.

This second effect of advertising is known as branding. We've all experienced the effects of branding before. Say you see ads on television for Brand X glue all the time. The ads don't seem to particularly affect you -- you don't leap from your couch to go buy glue -- but down the road, when you're at the store shopping for glue, they may affect the decision you make. If you don't have any other reason to choose one type of glue over the others, you'll probably choose the one you're most familiar with, Brand X, even if you're only familiar with it because of advertising.

There are several ways advertisers measure banner ad success.

• Clicks:
  The number of visitors who click on the banner ad linking to the advertiser's Web site. Publisher sites often sell banner ad space on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
  
• Page views:
  Also called page impressions, this is the number of times a particular Web page has been requested from the server. Advertisers are interested in page views because they indicate the number of visitors who could have seen the banner ad. Although they don't measure the effectiveness of a branding campaign, they do measure how many visitors were exposed to it. The most common way to sell banner ad space is cost per thousand impressions, or CPM .
• Click-through rate (CTR):
  This describes the ratio of page views to clicks. It is expressed as the percentage of total visitors to a particular page who actually clicked on the banner ad. The typical click-through-rate is something under 1 percent, and click-through rates significantly higher than that are very rare.
• Cost per sale:
  This is the measure of how much advertising money is spent on making one sale. Advertisers use different means to calculate this, depending on the ad and the product or service. Many advertisers keep track of visitor activity using Internet cookies. This technology allows the site to combine shopping history with information about how the visitor originally came to the site.