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I bumped into the following tips and ideas about maximizing your placement of affiliate / pay-per-click advertisements on your page and thought they were some very sensible suggestions. The source of this material is the Equifax Affiliate Newsletter, which highlights a valuable, if rarely considered, additional upside to joining some of the major affiliate programs too: it’s in their best interest to help you identify how best to position and present your affiliate links, so they’ll often help you create the best possible pages for their products.

On with their suggestions:

While there are many different ways to place affiliate links, placing links in context with the theme of your site or within a specific category is a very successful technique for many affiliates.Smart sellers know that product placement is essential to generating sales. This same rule applies to affiliate links on your site. Evaluate your site and organize your links in a way that makes the most sense for your audience to see, click, and take action. Keep the following guidelines in mind when designing your pages:

• Links placed in the upper right-hand corner of a site are more likely to be seen and clicked. Include special offers and new content in this location to maximum exposure.
• Try adding descriptive content around a link to improve link performance and let visitors know why the link is there.
• When incorporated into content, text links and product links have been proven to be much more effective link types than banner ads. When placed in context, product links can be closely matched to a visitor’s interests. Similarly, text links can be included directly into site content or product recommendations, providing a direct and simple transition between information that you provide and a product that you are advertising.
• Add a call-to-action in your site text or within the affiliate link. The words “buy this here,” “order now,” and “click here,” alert visitors to a commerce opportunity.

While the savvy among you may be saying “that’s pretty obvious”, it’s surprising how many sites offer affiliate links like this:

In fact, the affiliate program site says “use the HTML exactly as we present it”, but the Equifax newsletter obviously - and correctly - suggests that you’ll have better results with something like:

Unsure about your credit rating? We highly recommend that you check out the service today. It’s the best $9.00 you’ll spend this week!

You can clearly see the difference, I’m sure. In publishing it’s the difference between “advertising” and “advertorials”, and the latter performs quite a bit better than the former.

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Search engine optimization, or “SEO” in the biz, isn’t only for people trying to turn their Web site into a revenue machine, to make money online, but can really be useful for everyone building Web sites. There are lots of different facets to writing, designing and adjusting your Web pages to maximize the chance of them being a top result for search terms, but one of the best - and easiest - is to work with keyword density.

What is keyword density? It’s basically a measurement of how relevant a given keyword “topic” is to a page of material. For example, this page is quite relevant to the word ‘keyword’ and the phrase ‘keyword density’ because both occur many times. More importantly, the ratio of their occurances to the total number of words or phrases on the page is reasonably high because, well, they occur a bunch of times.

That’s what keyword density is about. The keyword density of the word “keyword” is calculated by counting the total number of words on the page, then figuring out how many of them are “keyword”. Typical highly-ranked sites have at least a 2-3% keyword density for the key search word or search phrase.

But don’t take my word for it. Check out the keyword density of your favorite Web page at Search Engine World with their terrific - free - keyword density analyzer. To keep your sanity, I suggest that you set it to ignore words of five letters or less.

Of course, SEOs will tell you that keyword density isn’t the only factor to consider when building your page. Among the other important search engine optimization topics are so-called keyword prominence, that is, where on your page the keyword or keywords appear. A title tag is considerably more prominent than the alt text of an image, for example. :-)

Nonetheless, it’s quite informative to search for a key phrase that you would like to have match your own site and then use the keyword density analyzer to see the density of top matched pages versus your own. Then add the phrase a few more times on your page, perhaps in the title or a h1 tag or similar, and try again.

And don’t be surprised if this change all by itself helps boost your site ranking on the search results.

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Hopefully you’ve played around with some HTML when you were building your custom 404 error page, as explained in our tutorial on creating your custom 404 error page , in which case this will be a breeze.

If not, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get ready to do some coding!

Step One: Identifying your 404 error page

The first step is to figure out which page is your custom 404 error page.

Most likely you’ve just built it, so that’s a very simple step, but if not, identify your httpd.conf file, then find the line therein that looks like this:

ErrorDocument 404 /errordoc-404.shtml

That’ll tell you what file is your 404 error page.

Step Two: Open up the file for editing

There are dozens of different Web page and HTML editors on the market, so your process will likely be different to what we use, but hopefully you have a tool like Homesite, BBEdit, or even vi or EMACS to edit the file and can do so directly. If not, you might need to download the HTML file from your server to your local computer then open it with a simple editor like NotePad (on Windows) or TextEdit (on the Macintosh) to proceed.

Step Three: Copy and paste this code

Now the fun part: copy the following lines of HTML and paste them directly into your custom 404 error page:

<form action=”http://www.google.com/search” name=”searchbox”
method=”get” style=”margin-left: 2em;” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”hl” value=”en” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”ie” value=”ISO-8859-1″ />
<input type=”hidden” name=”sitesearch” value=”programimi.com” />
<input maxlength=”256″ size=”40″ name=”q” value=”" />
<input type=”submit” value=”find it” name=”btnG”
style=”font-size:75%;” />
</form>

You need to change the domain name from programimi.com to your own domain, but that’s the only customization required. Save the changes and upload the new version of the file if needed.

Step Four: Testing

Once you’ve saved your new custom 404 error page, generate a page by hitting a link like http://www.example.com/badpage and looking for the form.

That’s all there is to it. You now have a lovely Google search engine that constraints itself automatically to a search of your pages only. Now you should ensure that Google knows about your site and you might also want to fix spelling problems too. :-)

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Now that MSN has removed the wraps on its new search engine (beta.search.msn.com), intended to compete with both Google and Yahoo, the obvious question on the minds of SEO people everywhere is: what algorithm is MSN going to use for their pagerank calculations?

Microsoft is being predictably coy: their FAQ states: “The MSN Search ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as page contents, the number and quality of sites that link to your pages, and the relevance of your site’s content to keywords. The algorithm is complex and never human-mediated.”

Nonetheless, there are some useful tips that give you a little bit of insight into how MSN is approaching search. This is all quoted from their site, and broken into three categories.

Technical Recommendations

• Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links function properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and people may not be able to reach all of your pages.
• If you move a page, set up the page’s original URL to direct people to the new page, and tell them whether the move is permanent or temporary.
• Make sure MSNBot is allowed to crawl your site, and is not on your list of web crawlers that are prohibited from indexing your site.
• Use a robots.txt file or meta tags to control how MSNBot and other web crawlers index your site. The robots.txt file tells web crawlers which files and folders it is not allowed to crawl.
• Keep your URLs simple and static. Complicated or frequently changed URLs are difficult to use as link destinations. For example, the URL www.example.com/mypage is easier for MSNBot to crawl and for people to type than a long URL with multiple extensions. Also, a URL that doesn’t change is easier for people to remember, which makes it a more likely link destination from other sites.

  Dave’s comment: In case MSN didn’t notice, the majority of traffic to a site are from search results, so the complexity of a URL doesn’t matter as much as they are saying here. It’s an interesting insight into their ranking criteria, imo.

Content Guidelines

• In the visible page text, include words users might choose as search query terms to find the information on your site.
• Limit all pages to a reasonable size. We recommend one topic per page. An HTML page with no pictures should be under 150 KB.
• Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.
• Create a site map that is fairly flat (i.e., each page is only one to three clicks away from the home page). Links embedded in menus, list boxes, and similar elements are not accessible to web crawlers unless they appear in your site map.
• Keep the text that you want indexed outside of images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is displayed on your page outside of a company logo.

You can learn more at the MSN Search Site Owner Help. Competition is always good, so it’ll be interesting to see what theories arise about how they’re ranking and ordering search results!

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