So, what does SEO means?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines' "natural," or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic"), search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,^[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.
The acronym "SEOs" can refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.


Relationship with search engines
By 1997, search engines recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Altavista and Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms in an effort to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.
Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEO service providers. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web,was created to discuss and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.
Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients.Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.
Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization.^[Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Bing Toolbox provides a way from webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feeds, allowing users to determine the crawl rate, and how many pages have been indexed by their search engine.

Source: SEO

SEO – First Look

Nowadays, we hear it everywhere we go. In many ways, SEO has become a key term in the Internet marketing world and for good reason - it really is invaluable. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it refers to several practices that are used to move your website up in Google’s search results.

Why would you want this? Generally, most Internet users consider the first results on any given search query as the most relevant to their search. Due to this paradigm, top results are visited by more people, giving those website more traffic and more income. 

SEO helps your website climb up through the ranks of every other website that targets the same keywords. We will focus today on Google, as it is the unequivocal leader in terms of online searching market share.

So How Does it Work?

The most basic part of SEO that must be understood is that search engines are counter-intuitive. They do not operate like humans, but work in a very mechanical way. While this may seem obvious, the real meaning of this concept is overlooked far too often.

Search engines rely heavily on text. They do not consider the hours put into a clever design or how you built the tension up with clever writing, but rather focus on Keywords and the structure (links) of your website.

Search engines “crawl” the Internet using tools known as Spiders (or Googlebots). These spiders “crawl” through your website, indexing, processing and calculating relevancy. Again, these sci-fi-esque creatures are much less sophisticated that what their name inspires – they look at text and code while ignoring Flash, Java, encrypted sections and frames.

Six Strategies to Becoming a Successful Affiliate

A fine article by Laura Lake about the different aspects of being a successful affiliate marketer.


Affiliate marketing is a low-cost way for merchants to build awareness and showcase their products and services. The model is simple; it works as a commission-based referral system. A partner or affiliate markets a merchant's products for a "piece of the pie."
Affiliate marketing experts often make an income that can tally over five figures per month, however only 1 to 5% of thousands of marketers achieve this level. When an affiliate reaches this elite level they are often referred to as a "super" affiliate.
How does one become a super affiliate? Can anyone do it? Super affiliates have common tactics that they embrace and put into place. Anyone can become a super affiliate, but it will not come without blood, sweat, and a hefty time commitment. The typical super affiliate possesses the following traits:

• Persistence
• Patience
• Thirst for Knowledge

These three traits combined with the following strategy gives you the formula for the makings of a "super" affiliate.

Choosing the Right Keywords

In many ways, keywords are one of the most important factors that an affiliate marketer should be aware of – they define your relevance to a user’s search on Google. Keywords are used by Google to identify the content on a webpage and match it to a search. For example, if you sell baby products on your webpage, the keywords found in the text all over your website are what tell Google that this page is relevant. If a user was to search for baby products, the better your keywords fit the specific search and related keywords, the higher you will be on list of results. There are, of course, many more factors that determine your website’s placement in search result, but this article will focus solely on keywords. Stay tuned for a big update on SEO and how you can promote your website.

Keywords refer to the main theme of your website. The more these keywords are found in your texts, the better (keep in mind that uploading a webpage with nothing but keywords is a very bad idea that will only harm your placement). For example, the word “Keyword” is in many ways one of the keywords for this article. Notice how many times it appears and that its’ positioning is justified content-wise – you’d be surprised how easily Google can spot a fake site.

What it takes to become an affiliate...

Shawn Collins, of http://blog.affiliatetip.com, tells you how affiliates can get started in affiliate marketing.

Source: Shawn collins

Affiliate Summit

The Affiliate Summit conference was founded by Affiliate marketing industry veterans Shawn Collins (affiliate), and Missy Ward and focuses on the affiliate marketing professional community.


Affiliate Summit started in November 2003 as a small, one day seminar at Baruch College in New York City. Affiliate Summit 2003 had 200 registered attendees and Affiliate Summit West 2011 had over 4,600 registered attendees.

Chronology of Affiliate Summit Events:
• November 3, 2003 (New York, NY): Affiliate Summit 2003
• June 24–28, 2004 (Cruise ship from New York, NY to Halifax, Nova Scotia): Affiliate Summit 2004
• June 13–14, 2005 (Las Vegas, NV): Affiliate Summit 2005
• January 8–10, 2006 (Las Vegas, NV): Affiliate Summit West 2006
• July 9–11, 2006 (Orlando, FL): Affiliate Summit East 2006
• January 21–23, 2007 (Las Vegas, NV): Affiliate Summit West 2007
• July 8–10, 2007 (Miami, FL): Affiliate Summit East 2007
• September 28, 2007 (London, England): Affiliate Summit London 2007
• February 24–26, 2008 (Las Vegas, NV): Affiliate Summit West 2008
• August 10–12, 2008 (Boston, MA): Affiliate Summit East 2008
• January 11–13, 2009 (Las Vegas, NV): Affiliate Summit West 2009
• August 9–11, 2009 (New York, NY): Affiliate Summit East 2009
• January 17–19, 2010 (Las Vegas, NV): Affiliate Summit West 2010
• August 15-17, 2010 (New York, NY): Affiliate Summit East 2010
• January 9–11, 2011 (Las Vegas, NV): Affiliate Summit West 2011
Upcoming...
• August 21-23, 2011 (New York, NY): Affiliate Summit East 2011
• January 8-10, 2012 (Las Vegas, NV): Affiliate Summit West 2012

Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards

The First Annual Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards Show took place on Monday, January 22, 2007 in Las Vegas. Six awards were presented to recognize outstanding contributions to the affiliate marketing industry during the previous year.
2007 Pinnacle Award Winners:
Affiliate of the Year: Scott Hazard
Affiliate Manager of the Year: Angel Djambazov, Affiliate Manager of OnlineShoes.com
Exceptional Merchant: Amazon
Affiliate Marketing Advocate Award: Brian Littleton, Founder/President of ShareASale
Best Blogger: Jim Kukral, Managing Editor ReveNews
Wayne Porter Affiliate Marketing Legend: Todd Crawford, VP of Sales / Commission Junction (1998–2006), VP of Sales and Business Development / OneNetwork by Digital River (since 2006)
2008 Pinnacle Award Winners:
Affiliate of the Year: Connie Berg, Owner Flamingo World
Affiliate Manager of the Year: Melissa Salas, Affiliate Manager of Buy.com
Exceptional Merchant: CSN Stores
Affiliate Marketing Advocate Award: Haiko de Poel Jr., Owner ABestWeb.com
Best Blogger: Sam Harrelson, Managing Editor ReveNews
Wayne Porter Affiliate Marketing Legend: Brian Littleton, Founder/President of ShareASale
2009 Pinnacle Award Winners:
Affiliate of the Year: Mike Allen, Shopping-Bargains.com
Affiliate Manager of the Year: Angel Djambazov for Jones Soda and Keen Footwear
Exceptional Merchant: CelebrateExpress.com
Affiliate Marketing Advocate Award: Melanie Seery, NYAffiliatevoice.com
Best Blogger: Scott Jangro, Jangro.com
Wayne Porter Affiliate Marketing Legend: Kellie Stevens, Owner AffiliateFairPlay.com
2010 Pinnacle Award Winners:
Affiliate of the Year: Nicholas Koscianski, NickyCakes.com
Affiliate Manager of the Year: Matt McWilliams, Legacy Learning Systems
Exceptional Merchant: eBay.com
Affiliate Marketing Advocate Award: Angel Djambazov, Managing Editor ReveNews
Best Blogger: Jeremy Schoemaker, ShoeMoney.com
Wayne Porter Affiliate Marketing Legend: Scott Jangro, MechMedia and Jangro.com
2011 Pinnacle Award Winners:
Affiliate of the Year: Deals.Woot
Affiliate Manager of the Year: Carolyn Kmet
Exceptional Merchant: Zappos
Affiliate Marketing Advocate Award: Lisa Picarille
Best Blogger: Eric Nagel
Wayne Porter Affiliate Marketing Legend: Todd Farmer

Affiliate Summit Speakers

2009 :
Advanced Landing Pages for Affiliates: Scott Brinker, President & CTO, ion interactive, inc.
Advanced Search Marketing For Affiliates: Gab Goldenberg, Owner, SEO ROI Services
Removing the Payments Headache: Yuval Tal, CEO, Payoneer
Using Photographs in Your Websites to Gain Traffic: Deborah Carney, CEO, Team Loxly
Removing Enterprise Barriers: Budgets, Silos, Creating Dominance: David Dalka, President, Dalka Strategy Consulting
2010 :
Todd Crawford, Co-Founder, Impact Radius
Matt Enders, CEO, mgecom, inc.
[Marty Fahncke, President, FawnKey & Associates
Markus Frind, CEO, Plentyoffish
Liat Fuchs,Affiliate Director, AffiliatePLY
2011 :
Robert Adler, President, The Link Builders
Mike Allen, President, Shopping-Bargains.com, LLC
Larry Bailin, CEO, Single Throw Internet Marketing
Drew Bennett, Blogger / Photographer, BenSpark.com
Mike Buechele, Chief Performance Marketer, Adalytical

Source: www.affiliatesummit.com

Great Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners

Listen to the very insightful Matt Carter tell us about the mistakes new affiliates sometimes make.

Affiliate Marketing – The Basics

Affiliate marketing is a very compelling idea; it provides many new income opportunities that have not only been unavailable, but were outright unimaginable a mere 2 decades back.

So what is affiliate marketing? While it may seem like everybody knows the online playground like the back of his own hand (or at the very least want you to think they do), some of us may still be left in the dark, or at least partially. 

In its essence, affiliate marketing revolves around the following mechanic: You (the affiliate) are rewarded for each visitor/customer you can bring to the business you are promoting. This can be done in any number of ways, but a good and simple example would be to consider some of the ads you encounter while surfing the web – the minority are simply paid-for ad space, but many of them are part of an affiliate marketing effort. If you visit a fishing-themed website, the ads promoting new fishing gear on the sides are just that – the website’s owner is rewarded for each reader the clicks the ad and/or makes a purchase eventually. There are different types of agreements between an affiliate and the promoted service, but the concept stays the same.

Now that we have the core of affiliate marketing down, let’s go over some of the key terms everyone should before diving in to the nearly limitless world of affiliate marketing:

Getting Started as an Affiliate

Getting Started

Finding an Affiliate Program to work with, or coming up with your own idea for a product-based website, is the easy part. Honestly, it is. You can simply visit one of the many Affiliate Networks on the internet, and browse through the programs until you find one that catches your interest. Or you could just as easily start with something YOU are passionate about or experienced with. All you have to do is PICK a topic, or a product - and you can fine tune your plans for the project from there.

Often, when people think of a great idea for a website - or any type of business, they are immediately put off by the amount of competition. DO NOT let that deter you. I'll share with you how I use the amount of competition to my advantage in any project...

The First Step --> Research

Once you get an idea in mind, you can easily determine whether it has profit potential. Your very first step is Keyword Research.

The Definition of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. 

The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. 

The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors. 

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. 

Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC - Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising.

On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing fake reviews of products or services offered by a partner. Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales. 

Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

Source: Affiliate Marketing

Joel Comm Shares Insights on Affiliate marketing

Joel Comm shares some of his insights on the world of affiliate marketing.

What is Affiliate Marketing All About?

What is affiliate marketing all about.