Today, following on from my previous post I want to talk to you about some basic SEO strategies which you should be using with all of your sites.

Your SEO strategies will be broken down into two main areas, one page SEO and off page SEO. In todays post I am going to be primarily talking about some quite simple on page SEO techniques which you should be implementing within your sites during and after the site build process.

On Page Search Engine Optimization

When looking at One Page SEO there are several things which you need to consider and ensure that you do. It's important for me to mention that the following list is not exhaustive and there may be other techniques and considerations to be taken into account but essentially if you get the following things right then you are on your way to building a well optimized site.

Your overall keyword placement

• Always remember to include the main keywords which you are trying to rank for within the main title of your page. Don't put huge chunks of text though which is meant just for the SE's, remember that your site should still be readable by humans.

• Ensure that you fill in description and keyword fields in your site's meta data, don't be lazy and leave them blank, if you do then you are only cheating yourself. Your description should contain your main keywords but remember that this description is the one which will be seen in the SE's by your potential visitors so again remember to write it so it's appealing to humans and not just SE bots.

• Where possible try to make use of your H1, H2, H3 & H4 tags. The H1 tag is where you should be inserting the main keyword on that particular page that you want to optimize for. You can then add additional keywords into your H2, H3 & H4 tags which are maybe less important than your main keyword(s) but will still bring you traffic.

• Write good quality, relevant and unique content for your site. The content should include your main keywords without affecting the way that the overall page reads. Try and get your main keyword(s) for that page both at the beginning of the content and at the end of the content. Without going over the top you can also bold or use the <strong></strong> tags around some of your important keywords, don't bold too many though, you don't want your page to look ridiculous.

• Utilize your alt tags. For those of you who don't know what they are, alt tags are tags which are attached to your images within your site. A typical alt tag would look something like this in a html view:  <img src="nice_image.jpg" height="200" width="200" alt="This could be your keyword">

You may or may not be surprised by the amount of webmasters who don't bother with alt tags and simply leave them blank. In certain circumstances you can use this to your advantage when you are trying to rank higher in the SE's for specific keywords, some well completed alt tags can make a difference between ranking above or below one of your main competitors. With this said you also have to be careful not to abuse them, when you are placing your alt tags in don't stick your keywords in every single one, simply use a few of them. With the remaining alt tags try to keep the description relevant, afterall alt tags were not initially built to gain SE ranking

Structure your site well & link between pages

• Make sure you structure your site well, this is more for your visitors than the SE's but you'd be amazed the amount of people who forget that visitors may actually need to navigate around their site and they simply build their site for bots. You can try to over optimize a site and make things ten times worse.

• Make sure you use basic html to link to other pages/content within your site. Don't start using flash or java this is not particuarly SE friendly.

• Use your keywords within anchor text to link to other pages. For example if you have a page in your site which lists gold rotary watches then make sure you link to that page using the keyword which you would want to rank for in the SE's using the following code as an example: <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/gold-rotary-watches>Gold Rotary Watches</a>

• Make sure you don't overdo it with over lengthy links, in addition don't try and cloak/hide them in any way, this will only get your site penalized by the SE's.

• Use the 'nofollow' attribute if you are linking to pages in your site which have very little to contribute, these include pages such as your contact page etc.

The above are some basic strategies for your on page SEO of your website, used properly they can benefit your site massively.

In the next post I will be talking about off page SEO.

Something which is still really important and often forgotten when building an affiliate site is the SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) aspect of the site build. Building a site in itself is not a particuarly difficult task but getting visitors to it is usually the part which people find hard and often boring, I have to say that I am one of those people. One thing in particular I hate doing is building links to my site but I realise how important it is in the success or failure of that particular site and no matter how pretty my site looks if it has no visitors to look at it then what's the point.

For me one of the biggest things which made me avoid doing any SEO to my sites initially when I first started out online was that I didn't really understand it, there didn't seem to be a clear guide out there which made things clear and simple, in fact in most cases the resources which were available to me only made things ten times worse. This said I avoided it completely, I would slap up a site full of eBay listings using BANS, add little content and then wonder why it made me no money. One of the key factors missing in my site build was SEO and unique site content, although site content can bring us into a whole other ball park so it's not something I am going to discuss in great detail for the remainder of this post.

What I want to say to you initially is don't be affraid of SEO, the basic prinicples of good SEO are not that hard at all, it's often the basic things which get missed and it's those things which can (if done correctly) make your site a success or a failure. Of course there are many other factors to be taken into consideration but overall good SEO is key from the beginning.

The benefit of building affiliate websites with scripts such as Wordpress is that the grunt work on the SEO can actually be done for you with plugins like All In One SEO, however there will still be some work left for you to do.

In the following two posts I will be talking about the basic strategies of on page SEO and off page SEO, along with some tips of what you should and shouldn't do.