At a recent affiliate marketing conference there was considerable discussion of SEO strategy.  As a summary of one session in particular, we offer the following 10 tips on ways to improve your search engine page rankings, as presented by Commission River VP Patrick Oborn.

• Register the targeted keyword in your domain name.  This requires research up-front in order to determine the most advantageous keywords relating to your site.
• Use folders instead of subdomains –  This technique keeps the search engine focused on your main domain, rather than a separate URL closely.  Instead of http://products.jimgreen.us, use http://www.jimgreen.us/products.html.
• Always use “www” in front of your domain – This will avoid the issue of splitting the focus on what the search engines consider two separate domains, e.g., http://www.jimgreen.us and http://jimgreen.use and result in higher rankings overall.  Using redirect in your domain hosting account will solve this problem.
• Use dashes vs. underscores in file names
• Use “<h1>” tags properly, e.g., H1 should match your Page Title Meta Tags for ease of indexing by the search engines.
• Google is now evaluating page load time in rankings.  This can be improved by: 1) shrinking graphics size, 2) removing syndicated ad feeds and 3) upgrading hosting to a faster server.  Google is considering slow loading pages as less than serious about their Internet presence.
• Use 3-way or 4-way linking strategies vs. simple reciprocal linking and keep your linking partners relevant to your area of business.

• Create actual 404.html pages.  Without this, the search engine may find “duplicate” pages  that your site is generating for broken links.  Use of hard 301 redirect will fix this issue.
• Use long tail keywords such as 3 or 4 words, so that you are also encapsulating shorter 1 and 2 word keywords.
• Use alt tags for all images on your website.  These tags should be long tail keywords where possible to provide as much information as possible to the search engines.

We hope that these tips will be immediately useful in helping your website reach the top rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  Please leave any comments and suggestions to improve our community.

Jim Green is a SEO expert with over 10 years experience in affiliate marketing and network marketing systems.  Commission River is an afflliate marketing program featuring many products in the telecommunications arena and a wealth of SEO expertise and tools, including free XML plug-ins to faciliate creation of affiliate websites.