You will often here the statement "Content is King!" This statement is completely true; content is amongst one of the most important things you will be adding to your website and yet it is one of the most common things which is often neglected or left out completely.

Building an affiliate site is easy, right? Well the answer to that is yes and no; building an affiliate site which will be very successful is very easy indeed but actually building a site which your visitors want to visit and spend time browsing and searching through is another matter entirely. Scripts such as BANS, storestacker and other affiliate store builders have made it incredibly easy just to slap an ugly, contentless, non-SE optimized site together in the space of around 10 minutes or less. This has meant there are a lot of people out there trying to build a site which works by putting a 'thinly vieled' affiliate site together in around 10 minutes flat. As I am sure you can guess these sites do not usually do very well and normally disappear from the SE listings.

There is one main thing which I always do when I am building a new site and that is sit back and ask myself, would I buy from this site or spend any time on this site if I happened to come across it during my search? If the answer is yes then the chances are that I'm are on the right lines.

There are two main reasons why getting your content right is so important and they are:

1) You want to engage your visitors, keep them interested and make them want to come back.
2) You want to please the search engines, this means don't try any deceptive or manipulative methods in your site building, the SE's will only penalize you for it in the long run.

When you are creating your content you obviously want to consider your keyword research which you will have been doing during your preparation process. The keyword lists you have obtained will generally dictate the sort of content you are going to place on your site.

Don't get too carried away with your content keyword density. What I mean by this is that you are building the pages for your visitors to read and not just for the search engines to give you a good ranking. It's no use whatsoever if you build fantastic pages which the search engines love if the content just isn't up to scratch from a reader's point of view. You have to find a balance between the two, of course you want the get good search engines rankings but you also want the content to be relevant and of interest to your readers as well.

Don't try to manipulate or fool the SE's. I have seen this in particular with Wordpress, there are several plugins out there which insert small snipets of javascript directly into the text content which is only viewable by the search engine spiders. This little trick allows people to re-use content over and over again without being slapped for duplicate content. The fact is though that as much as you try to deceive the search engines there will come a point in time when they become wise to this trick and start to build ways to get around it. You also have to ask yourself the question why you would want a site full of content which has already been published around the web before. I know many of you will argue that duplicate content penalties only apply when your own site has the same content on multiple pages but Google quite clearly states that you should not 'create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with substantially duplicate content.' My advice is don't be lazy, do the work yourself and the rewards will come.

My advice would be the following:

• Always abide by the SE webmaster guidelines. The links for some of those are below:

For Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
For Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics

• For MSN: 18.htmlhttp://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-gb&project=wl_webmasters

• Create content which is both relevant to your visitors and rich for the search engine spiders. Find a balance.

• Create content for each page of your site and never leave pages with just affiliate listings on.

• Don't use duplicated content unless you have re written it and it now passes copyscape without any devious tactics and don't use duplicate content inside your own site.

• Always place content around your affiliate listings, above and below. Don't just place content above.

• Don't try and decieve the search engines with blackhat techniques, it will do you no favours in the long run.

• Ask yourself, would you visit your site and if so would you come back again.

• Write content related to your keyword lists generated from your extensive keyword research.

• Build your site slowly from the ground upwards, don't build sites too quickly, remember it's about quality and not quantity.

• Lastly, win the trust of the SE's and you won't go far wrong.

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