Building solid backlinks for an e-commerce / affiliate marketing website - do you agree with me?
- SEO |
Hi all,
Over the past almost year I've been committed through thick and thin to building an e-commerce / affiliate marketing website. I've stated "e-commerce" in its name because I'm not selling e-books, rather physical goods to earn my commission. There's not a click bank offer anywhere near it.
My conversion rates are good IMHO, from what I see it's about 4-5% so a sale about every 20-25 or so clicks. I've also put a lot of thought and effort (which I continue doing) in my site becoming an authority in its field. This way I keep visitors happy with free honest and extensive advice and the search engines equally satisfied with fresh regular content (writing comes naturally to me, especially if I know the topic like the back of my hand). So far my website has 90 pages of unique content and growing.The website design is very intuitive and as far as I can tell tuned for SEO so not to deter human beings or web-bots. My work ethics are against flooding a website with affiliate links without offering visitors value in the form of free and genuine advice that builds trust (and perhaps it will boost viral marketing down the line too).
So far I've done:
- On-site / off-site SEO
- Blog commenting
- Forum posting
- Answering questions on specific websites (i.e. Yahoo Answers etc.)
- Some Web 2.0 community pages on relevant websites (i.e. Squidoo, Weebly etc.)
- Article marketing (only a few articles submitted to Ezine Articles thus far)
- Submitted my site to various web directories (I'm listed in some but I don't think they get a lot of traffic)
- Internal linking between the pages of my website
- Making sure my site map always contains all the links to my pages for easy spidering
All the above manually. I've looked at various automated tools but haven't come to be overly convinced into using them, as far as I can see they solve some problems but create others a lot of the time. Feel free to shake my mind on this (maybe I really am stressing myself too much by doing things manually?).
Wherever possible (relating to the above list) I always try and post a backlink on pages that are relevant to the topic areas I'm addressing and also use appropriate anchor text in the links (i.e. either my keyword phrases or words on the page I'm linking to).
I'm on page 1 of SERP in Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask usually at positions 2-8 (Google seems hardest to crack) for my main theme keyword. In Yahoo I'm also fairly high (page 2 SERP) for some related keywords to my niche. I'm pretty pleased about this because all my competitors have more backlinks than you can shake a stick at (obviously very few are properly nested given I can outrank them) and mature domains. There's also a lot of PPC advertising going on in my niche (main theme keyword or otherwise) so I know I'm mixing with the right (though perhaps tougher to beat) crowd.
I've finally got to the stage that I'm generating generally low but repetitive commission every single week.
Because Money = T x C1 x C2 (C2 being commission) I need to get more traffic. To do this I want to build up my organic traffic. After much deliberation I'm pretty sure there's only one way to do it:
a) continue cranking out helpful / focussed content
b) keep building focussed keyword rich backlinks
Since I'm doing all this manually (am I very determined or just plain stupid?) I *think* my effort is best used in article marketing. My plan now (apart from adding new content to my site) is:
- Add articles to my own website
- Once an article is indexed on my own website, add it to the top 10 article directories without changing anything but the article title, and making sure the resource box backlink contains my main theme keyword
- Next, rinse and repeat the above until I am #1 for my main theme keyword in all the major search engines
- Once I am #1 for my main theme keyword in all the major search engines do the same but this time link back on new article submissions using a secondary keyword phrase
My question is whether I'm right to pursue this plan? Is there anything you could add / do differently? Please remember this site promotes physical goods and is becoming an authority in its niche. For this reason I believe in white-hat / grey-hat (at most) techniques.
For example, is it okay for me to re-post the same articles that I post on my site to the article directories rather than writing separate articles for both (a lot more work)?
Thanks for taking the time out to read the above, and thanks so much for your opinions in advance.
Over the past almost year I've been committed through thick and thin to building an e-commerce / affiliate marketing website. I've stated "e-commerce" in its name because I'm not selling e-books, rather physical goods to earn my commission. There's not a click bank offer anywhere near it.
My conversion rates are good IMHO, from what I see it's about 4-5% so a sale about every 20-25 or so clicks. I've also put a lot of thought and effort (which I continue doing) in my site becoming an authority in its field. This way I keep visitors happy with free honest and extensive advice and the search engines equally satisfied with fresh regular content (writing comes naturally to me, especially if I know the topic like the back of my hand). So far my website has 90 pages of unique content and growing.The website design is very intuitive and as far as I can tell tuned for SEO so not to deter human beings or web-bots. My work ethics are against flooding a website with affiliate links without offering visitors value in the form of free and genuine advice that builds trust (and perhaps it will boost viral marketing down the line too).
So far I've done:
- On-site / off-site SEO
- Blog commenting
- Forum posting
- Answering questions on specific websites (i.e. Yahoo Answers etc.)
- Some Web 2.0 community pages on relevant websites (i.e. Squidoo, Weebly etc.)
- Article marketing (only a few articles submitted to Ezine Articles thus far)
- Submitted my site to various web directories (I'm listed in some but I don't think they get a lot of traffic)
- Internal linking between the pages of my website
- Making sure my site map always contains all the links to my pages for easy spidering
All the above manually. I've looked at various automated tools but haven't come to be overly convinced into using them, as far as I can see they solve some problems but create others a lot of the time. Feel free to shake my mind on this (maybe I really am stressing myself too much by doing things manually?).
Wherever possible (relating to the above list) I always try and post a backlink on pages that are relevant to the topic areas I'm addressing and also use appropriate anchor text in the links (i.e. either my keyword phrases or words on the page I'm linking to).
I'm on page 1 of SERP in Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask usually at positions 2-8 (Google seems hardest to crack) for my main theme keyword. In Yahoo I'm also fairly high (page 2 SERP) for some related keywords to my niche. I'm pretty pleased about this because all my competitors have more backlinks than you can shake a stick at (obviously very few are properly nested given I can outrank them) and mature domains. There's also a lot of PPC advertising going on in my niche (main theme keyword or otherwise) so I know I'm mixing with the right (though perhaps tougher to beat) crowd.
I've finally got to the stage that I'm generating generally low but repetitive commission every single week.
Because Money = T x C1 x C2 (C2 being commission) I need to get more traffic. To do this I want to build up my organic traffic. After much deliberation I'm pretty sure there's only one way to do it:
a) continue cranking out helpful / focussed content
b) keep building focussed keyword rich backlinks
Since I'm doing all this manually (am I very determined or just plain stupid?) I *think* my effort is best used in article marketing. My plan now (apart from adding new content to my site) is:
- Add articles to my own website
- Once an article is indexed on my own website, add it to the top 10 article directories without changing anything but the article title, and making sure the resource box backlink contains my main theme keyword
- Next, rinse and repeat the above until I am #1 for my main theme keyword in all the major search engines
- Once I am #1 for my main theme keyword in all the major search engines do the same but this time link back on new article submissions using a secondary keyword phrase
My question is whether I'm right to pursue this plan? Is there anything you could add / do differently? Please remember this site promotes physical goods and is becoming an authority in its niche. For this reason I believe in white-hat / grey-hat (at most) techniques.
For example, is it okay for me to re-post the same articles that I post on my site to the article directories rather than writing separate articles for both (a lot more work)?
Thanks for taking the time out to read the above, and thanks so much for your opinions in advance.
Kind Regards
Dean Thornton
Search Engine Placement