What is SEO?

SEO

Ah, SEO….It is time!

If you have been in Internet Marketing for even a month, I am sure you heard of the magic around SEO. I will try to keep things as simple as possible in this section because SEO can get very confusing.

Let’s start from the basics. What’s SEO?

What’s SEO?

If I put it in simple terms, SEO is the art of ranking a website on the first page of Google so that it gets visitors from different search queries.

No matter how beautiful your dog food website is, if it doesn’t come on the first page with a search query like ‘best dog food’, people are not going to find it. If people don’t find your website, you don’t earn. That’s where SEO comes into play.

Here’s a Joke: If you want to hide a dead body, the best place is the 2nd page of Google Search Results.
This is true. Think about your last Google search. Did you go to page 2? I bet you did not. This is why SEO is so vital. It can make or break a business and when it comes to Amazon Affiliate Marketing, we only rely on SEO to get traffic on our websites.

Now, there are more than 200 factors that helps Google decide which website should have the first position and which one should go to the dead end. We are not going to cover all 200 because frankly, the ranking power is not distributed equally.

For example, having a SSL certificate is a ranking factor but this doesn’t have the same power as having backlinks which is another ranking factor. We are going to focus on the most important ones which will eventually rank your affiliate website on the first page.

SEO Can be divided into two segments.

On page SEO
Off page SEO

On Page SEO would be stuff that you do on your website (that’s where on-page comes from) and Off page would be stuff that you do off your website.

Let’s use an example. Suppose, now we know that we need to have a mobile friendly website, right? If we create a mobile friendly one, that falls under on page because we did it on our site.

On the other hand, if we need backlinks and we get it from a 3rd website, that’s off page because we didn’t do anything on our website, right?

Pretty simple stuff.

Off Page SEO then again can be divided into two segments.

White Hat SEO
Black/Gray Hat SEO

White Hat SEO would be stuff that will not give your website a risk penalty. On the other hand, Black Hat SEO methods are strategies that Google does not approve of but they work. The most popular Black Hat Strategy would be PBN (Private Blog Networks).

Let’s start with On Page SEO Factors first.

On Page Factors To Know
The URL: Most SEOs deny this but EMD (Exact Match Domains) or PMD (Partial Match Domains) still help you in ranking a website for a particular keyword.

What do I mean?

Suppose, you want to rank for best dog food on Google. If your domain is Bestdogfood.com then you have a good chance of making it. However, if your website is dogfoodparadise.com then it is even better. This is an example of a partial match domain. You are not flashing that you are trying to manipulate Google with an EMD and at the same time, you have two of your keywords within that domain name.

Couldn’t get better, right?

The same goes for the inner pages of your website. Suppose your website is dogfoodparadise.com and now you are doing an article targeting a keyword ‘dog toys. Make sure that your final URL looks something like this: dogfoodparadise.com/dog-toys-reviews

Don’t only put your keyword on the URL. Add words after or before the keyword to make it look natural in terms of Google’s vision.

H1 Tags: It is very important to have your keyword within a H1 tag of your article. This gives Google a clear signal on what the article is all about. Keep your keyword once in the H1 tag of the article.

Content Length: This is arguable and this varies from industry to industry. The best practice would be to check your top 5 competition and get the average word count of their pages. Then simply beat it by 500 words. Google likes in-depth and long content. This is surely going to help you to rank better.

Internal Linking: Make sure that you have enough relevant internal linking on your page that links to other pages of your website. Do not just link to them for no reason. Make it relevant and do as much as you can, naturally. This creates a brilliant SILO structure for your website.

Outbound Linking: Many people think that outbound linking is bad which is not true at all. Outbound links help Google to understand what your website is about. So if your website is about dog food and if you find good information on internet about dog food that you think will be valuable for your readers, do not shy away from linking to them. This helps.

LSI Keywords: There was once a time back in the days when you could literally mention your one keyword hundred times on a page and get ranked for that. Times have changed and now it is very dynamic. If you want to rank for dog food reviews now, you will have to talk about LSI keywords (simply related keywords) within that same article.

What can be some related ones for this keyword? They can be stuff like vet recommended dog food, dog food that are good/bad, dog food allergy, etc. Make it a complete article covering as much as you can within the keyword’s topic and you will see great results.

Image Optimization: Don’t only add relevant images with your article, make sure that they are properly optimized too. With WordPress, you can easily add ‘alt- tags’ with your images. Go one step further and change the file name of the image before you upload it on your database.

Meta Description: Around 43% people click on a search result from Google based on the meta description they read. Do not avoid meta description at any cost.

Yes, it is true that there is no guarantee Google will pick your meta description but you should still give it a try. With Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily setup your meta description for every page. Do it.

Keep It Fresh: Once again, this is somewhat arguable. Where some marketers think that keeping it fresh doesn’t work, I think otherwise because I have seen results personally by changing and updating my existing articles once in a while. If you have an article that is older than 6 months, go back to that article and change stuff here and there. There is a high chance that you will see a ranking improvement based on that change.

Once again, I want to mention that there are other on-page SEO factors that I am ignoring. Simply because, we have already covered them in this book. For example, having a mobile friendly site or having good page loading speed- they all fall under on page factors and we talked about all of ‘em, didn’t we?

Let’s focus on Off-Page SEO now.

Off Page SEO

Arguably, Backlinks is the reason that why a website gets ranked on the first page of Google. Backlink is a link that you get from a 3rd website to your website. There are different methods of getting one and almost all of them fall under different off- page SEO strategies.

We will only talk about off-page SEO strategies that will help you as an Amazon Affiliate Marketer. Let’s begin.

Blog Commenting: I know what you are thinking! Come on Khalid, who does blog comments in 2023? Aren’t they dead?

They are! As we know it. But I will teach you a different style.

When you do a blog comment as an affiliate marketer, forget that you are looking for a backlink. Simply focus on building relationships with the website that you are commenting on. That’s it. Read the article and ask questions in the comments. Do not put general comments like “the article is awesome”. Make your comment count and write something that the website owner wants to reply to.

Consider blog comments as a way of communicating with the website owner which will result in getting a backlink later on. When you have a good relation with the owner of that website, you can transform this relation into a guest post, a link roundup or another strategy to get a backlink from that site.

Forums: Join 5-10 forums that talk about your website’s topic. Do not shamelessly start promoting your links here and there. Start helping people genuinely. Forget about getting links for the first 3 months if possible and genuinely help people. This will help you to get a great profile on these forums. Almost all forums work with moderators and your great profile will help you to get points and stuff. They all add up.

Forums are not only places to get backlinks. They are also great places to get ideas for your next batch of content. Listen to what people are saying, what are their problems and come up with solutions in the form of content on your website.

HARO: HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. It is a website where reporters seek for resources every day. Registration is free so register there and select the topics that you want to be contacted for.

From now on, you will get one or two lists every day where you will see reporters asking for information. If you think you have answers to any of those, connect with that journalist and genuinely help them out. This in many cases will result in a backlink for you.

Here’s a good resource on HARO that you should read: https://ahrefs.com/blog/haro- link-building/

Infographic SEO: Infographic SEO has worked really well for many internet marketers in the last couple of years. If you are in a good niche with a potential to have lots of image content, the chance is very high that it would work for you too.

The idea is pretty simple. Suppose, you are a dog food review website. You create a beautiful infographic around a topic related to dogs and then you email other websites and offer them that infographic for free.

They can either use your code to insert the Infographic on their website or they can manually upload it and give your website a credit. This seems like a simple solution but it has worked really well in terms of acquiring backlinks for me and many of my students. Try it.

Here’s a detailed guide about this strategy: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-build-links- with-infographics

Guest Posting:

Guest posting is probably the most popular, yet underrated SEO strategy that’s available out there. The idea is super simple.

You reach out to blogs of similar niches as yours and you ask permission to post on their website a ‘guest post’ AKA an article and you get either a contextual link (a link from the body of that article) or a link from an author bio.

There are different variations of guest posts but the pillar remains the same.

Let me break down a guest post campaign for you.

Step 1: The first step for you is to gather information about your target websites. Create a list on excel with the website’s name, website owner’s email address/website’s contact & the title that you are planning to propose as a guest post.

Let’s assume we own a website about dog food and now are looking for guest post opportunities.

I will go ahead and search all possible dog food related queries on Google and start listing website addresses. Spending 10 hours will easily give me at least 500-1000 websites and their contact details. If you don’t have time, hire a VA to do this.

Step 2: Now it is time to contact these website owners. Be patient. You do not need to contact 100s of them every day. Send out two emails but make them detailed. Call them by their name, talk about their website, if you see any problems on their website, mention that and if you see anything that you like on their website, mention that too.

Remember, you are building a relationship here and it is a lot more than just a backlink.

Most people use a mass email sending service to send out generic emails to every contact on their list. Never do this. You obviously will bear the risk of appearing on spam or promotions folder and also, the response rate will be super low.

If your emails are good (try with different variations), you should expect to have at least 20% conversion rate from guest post campaigns.

Pro Tip: You can also reach websites via their Facebook page or Twitter profile or even Instagram DM. Don’t think that email is the only way to reach those owners.

Pro Tip 2: Use a personal email while contacting. Service@website.com is not as lucrative as alex@website.com or even alex@gmail.com.

Resource Page Link Building:

Once again, my motto here is to make you understand the SEO strategies with the shortest amount of words possible. Let’s try with resource page link building.

Step 1: Finding resource pages

Obviously, if you are trying to do resource page link building, the first step would be finding ‘em.

We will be using a search string to find resource pages. Let’s assume we still have our dog food review website.

The search query that we will use is “dog food” + inurl: links/resources

Try with both links and resources and do a Google search.

You will now see results that have either the word ‘links’ or ‘resources’ on the url. Let me show you an example here:

Seeing the resource pages? Collect as many URLs of these pages as possible along with contact information. Once you are done with this step, let’s move to step 2.

Step 2: Contacting them

Step two is nothing but contacting these websites and telling them that “hey, I got a cool dog food review website. As you already got a resource page, would you mind adding my website to the page too”?

This does the trick in most occasions. However, obviously, this is not the email script that you should use. Follow the tips I gave you in the ‘guest posting’ chapter. Call them by their real name and bla bla. They all add up, trust me.

Link Out Strategy:

I personally love this strategy. There’s a theory by Gary Veynarchuck that if you want to get something from someone, you should give value first. He calls it Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook & I call it link out strategy.

So we still got our dog food review website. Think about this. What if I create a resource page and link out to all the cool websites out there about dogs. Once I am done with that, I will contact them and tell them that hey, I gave you a link. Check this post out.

That’s it.

Remember, I won’t pitch anything at this stage.

Once I make relations with the website owners via this method, I will slowly convert this relation into guest posts, resource page link building and other strategies. This is long term but works very well. I strongly recommend you try this strategy.

Broken Link Building:

Once again, the idea is very simple. You contact websites and tell them that they have broken links/ 404 error pages and other issues on their website. Before contacting them, you have your own resource ready on that same topic and you offer it as a replacement. Let’s use an example to understand it better.

Install the Chrome Extension “Check My Links”. This extension will allow you to check all the links of a website. Using this extension is super simple so I won’t go into too much detail.

Now remember you got a list of a lot of websites from guest posting and resource page link building research phase?

Go to each one of those websites and use that extension to see how many 404 errors or bad links that they have. Once you find one (you will surely get a lot if the website is big), try to create an article on your website on similar topic and get back to them.

The email will say something like, hey, this link on your website doesn’t go anywhere. I have an article on the same topic. Would you mind replacing your 404 error page link with this article?

Think about it. The chance is super high that they will. Right?

Crowd sourcing & Top 10 Strategy:

Once again, this is more of a relationship building strategy rather than SEO. Let’s go back to our dog food review website.

What I will do is, I will create a dedicated page on my site and will talk about the best websites out there on the same topic. I will then reach out to them and tell them that look, I told my audience how good your website is. Isn’t that awesome?

On crowd sourcing , we do it in a different way. You will find a topic, let’s say, our topic in this case is “My First Dog”.

I will then reach out to all the top websites in my niche and will ask the webmasters to write 100 words for my roundup post about their first dog.

Once they respond, I will gather all data and will create a post giving all of them back links from my site.

This doesn’t help my SEO immediately. Yes, some of them will share my article on their social profile which will result in traffic but the actual benefit is long term. They are now my friends, right?

I can ask for back links from them any time in exchange for guest posts.

PBNS aka Private Blog Networks

By far you know that the major of our time we spend to develop our websites is looking for back links in some way. That’s where PBNs come into play. Before I write more, I should for sure, tell you that PBN is a complete Black Hat Method and Google can penalize you anytime for using PBNs.

I don’t recommend using them but I definitely agree that they work really well even in 2018 if you can do things right.

Let’s talk about the idea of PBNs.

So the idea is that, as I have a dog review website and I need backlinks from other dog sites to rank my site, why don’t I create more sites to give backlinks to my main one?

This worked easily back in the days and then Google started to understand that people are now manipulating results. That’s when Google slapped SEOs with different penalties and many sites went under the truck. Since then, PBN builders have become very cautious and the art of designing PBN sites have changed too.

Please understand that if I want to teach you how to build a PBN network then this book will need another 100 pages. I will, however, try to briefly tell you how things work.

So, the first thing that you need to build a PBN network is expired domains.

Expired domains are domains that previous owners didn’t renew. These domains have value in terms of authority, backlinks and trust from Google. You will use that power.

I recommend using different forums or FB groups to buy expired domains. There are a few websites to who sells expired domains and you can scrape on your own too from sites like Expireddomains.net.

Try to look for domains that meet these criteria:

The domain must match your niche. So if you are building a dog site, the domain should at least be something related to animals
No previous spammy backlinks (you can check backlinks using tools like Ahrefs or Moz)
Make sure that the domain hasn’t been used as a PBN before. (Use tools like Archieve.org or Screenshots.com)
Try to get domains that have at least a trust flow of 10+ and Domain Authority of 10+ on Majestic.com
Try to get domains that have backlinks from your industry (this is the most important criteria)

Once everything matches, go buy that domain. You can use any registry you want if you are building a small network (10-20 sites). Activate Whois guard on domain profiles and you will be fine.

The next phase is buying your hosting account. Remember, every piece of website on your PBN network should be sitting in a different IP. So ideally, if you have 10 domains to build PBNs, you need 10 different hosting companies. recommend signing up with the most popular ones so that your PBNs can hide among real websites.

Once you have the websites ready, publish at least 5-8 articles on the topic of your main website (money site). On the 8th or the 9th article, give your money site a backlink using a proper anchor text.

What’s an anchor text?

An anchor text is basically a text (a group of words) that has the link back to your main site. Don’t repeat your anchor texts. Use different variations.

For example, if I want to get backlinks for my dog food review website and if I want to rank for dog food reviews, my anchor texts will be:
Dog food review
Dog food
Dog food for my dog
Pet food review 2018 And so on.
It takes time for Google to index the PBNs and you should not manually force it (though some do).

Give your main website one backlink at a time and monitor the changes. You will soon start to see positive results.

Things That You Should Never Do With PBNs

Using SEO/PBN hosting solutions
Using spun content
Not designing the PBN sites properly

Exit Strategies

We are almost towards the end of this eBook. Before I finish, I should tell you about exit strategies.

Remember, when you built your affiliate website, you actually built an asset that you can flip.

Selling Your Website

Once your website has started making money, you can think about selling your site. At this moment (in 2018), websites get around 30X of their monthly profit. So for example, if your website is making around
$500 a month, you can expect to sell it for around $15,000.

Where to sell it?

The first place would be Empire Flippers. They are a new company but very trustworthy in the space. They give good multiples on your monthly profit and the chance is very high that you will end up being happy.

The problem with EF is that they do not accept sites that make less than
$500/Month. So if you want to sell a site that’s making less than $500/month, you should move to the second option which is Flippa.

Flippa is one of the world’s first website buying-selling platform. They now also do Shopify, Apps and etc. but even today, website buyers and sellers go there to buy/sell sites.

The beauty of Flippa is that you can sell a site even if it is making no money.
Customers bid for a site (kinda like eBay) and the winner gets it if you agree to that price. Flippa charges a $27 listing fee and then 15% of the total selling fee. Overall, it is worth it.

What Next?

So, what can you do now? You just sold your website (hopefully). Now you should create another site with the money you got from the first sale. That’s how most affiliate marketers make big bucks. They sell a small site and gather little money to invest and create better and bigger websites.

Written by
Khalid Farhan
Digital Marketer and SEO Specialist
Ireland,Dublin

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