Having left affiliate management, Gerodie’s focused on his new venture as an affiliate marketer and actively oversees and manages several properties with his business partners.

I invited Gerodie on the Friday Podcast to get his insight on:

• Techniques on setting up and optimizing PPC and SEO offers
• How your AdWords account history can impact your PPC campaigns
• PPC bidding strategies
• His perspective on spytools and analytics services
• How to continually keep yourself motivated to succeed and scale your business
• Business management and growth tips

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Geordie on twitter
• Geordie’s previous appearance on the Friday Podcast

If you’re relying on organic traffic generation methods, especially from the search engines, there have been recent developments which may cause a change in your strategy.

Some of these include:

• The Rise of Blackhole Seo
• Changes in ranking alogorithmn like Google PageRank (a number of websites and blogs saw their PR score drop by 1 or more in recent weeks) and Alexa rankings have fluctuated greatly since the system was change a number of months ago
• Looming changes Google plans to or has implemented since as lower weightage given to directory links (thanks Wil Reynolds for the heads-up), including paid Yahoo directory submissions.

Which can be like an earthquake sending ripples through your business and earnings if you’re not prepared.

I was speaking with Geordie Carswell, former RevenueWire CEO who’s now involved with his own affiliate marketing projects and his business is thriving, despite the negative indicators about the economy.

In most cases, even with the drop from Google’s PR and dip in Alexa rankings, traffic and conversion levels still remain strong within my websites.

In almost all cases, launching a new campaign or creating a new product will more than offset any hits (real or imagined) that arose because of a change in the search engine algorithmn.

The challenge in being a successful online marketer lies in being able to adapt to change and more importantly, staying ahead of the curve.

By adding new tactics and new strategies to what you’re already doing, you can more than overcome any negatives in the present or the future.

Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins recently uploaded Wil’s slides from his presentation together with other presentations and they can be access here: Affiliate Summit East 2008 presentation slides.

From his “My Favourite 5 SEO Strategies Exposed” session, one of the items Wil talked about was Google’s recent Knol, or knowledge aggregation site.

Located at Knol.google.com, the site seems like a combination of Squidoo in that users can create topic-focused resource pages, with the authority of a Wikipedia.

Knol pages have ranked prominently in Google’s results, such as Aaron Wall’s recent experiment with Search Engine Optimization.

The pages (highlighted in red above) provide opportunity for outbound links, with Wil mentioning the following factors:

And the following factors affecting Knol page ranking:

In addition Wil provides a more tips for refining your Google Knol by using Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker together with other tools like Google Trends, editing your Knol regularly and leaving it open to editing by others.

2 other SEO resources that Wil went into detail for fine tuning your SEO efforts were:

Link Diagnosis:

Link Diagnosis seems to operate on the Yahoo! Search API. During my trial with it, it seemed to take some time and the job didn’t complete. More testing due in time.

The other resource is SEOQuake, which I’ve blogged about before.

Wil goes into detail into how you can use these 2 tools in his presentation.

For more details, visit the ASE08 Presentations Download page.

If it’s anything like previous Affiliate Summits, Shawn might have the videos up in due course.

While not going into the specific nuts-and-bolts factors influencing SERPs (or search engine results pages), Amit outlined a number of broad principles to keep in mind when optimizing your web pages.

Principle 1: “Best locally relevant results served globally”

As I’ve earlier noted, your geographic location, specifically your IP number can determine the search results returned.

Amit’s assurance that they operate on the “no query left behind” principle, meaning every user query gets the most relevant results, is yet another assertion that the “user experience” more so than the affiliate marketer, SEO or even adwords advertiser’s interest is given priority.

If you’ve been following developments (and educated guesses) in the SEO field, you’ll know that meta criteria like “time on site” and other deeper level criteria from Google Analytics (and no doubt, Google own deeper level analytics, and possibly algorithms derived from basic analytics) are being incorporated into these ranking factors.

I applaud the SEOs who’re on the leading edge in following and sometimes trying to step ahead of Google to rank higher in the SERPs. For the average internet marketer, developing a long term sustainable business model and providing original, quality, link worthy content is probably the best route for now.

Principle 2: Keep It Simple

What’s simple to a UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon comp sci major might be rocket science to the average man.

Again, the average man-in-the-street marketer is going to be hard pressed to come up with anything innovative, unless you’ve got the technical chops of a BlueHat SEO with his madlib and deeplinking strategies.

As Google has mentioned in its Quality Guidelines, using off-the-shelf software can lead to detrimental results in your rankings (disclaimer: unless you have the technical knowhow to understand the system, rather than keying in your URL and hitting the submit button).

Principle 3: No Manual Intervention

What’s interesting is that the ranking team is making about 10 changes to the algorithm each week, which accounts for the fluctuations in SERP positions (in addition to data from spider data).

Here’s the double-edged sword for marketers and business owners “Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries” – Which explains the phenomenon where a crackdown on MFA (made-for-adsense) sites also takes down legitimate sites – because of a rule-based algorithm. The “trick” is figuring out how to stay on the right side of big G and benefitting from the changes.

Which isn’t difficult if you approach building your online business just like a brick-and-mortar business – based on solid fundamentals, with a long term view and on a sustainable basis.

For “Andrew Wee” from a Singapore IP, here’s the result:

But if I do the same search using a US IP:

Spot the difference?

The expanded listing you see above are what Google calls “Sitelinks”

Some have said sitelinks could be an indicator of your site’s status as an authority site in Google’s eyes.

If that’s true, it makes sense, because about 70-80% of my traffic comes from the US, while about 10% comes from Singapore.

So traffic weightage plays a part in the display of sitelinks.

Back in her Google Webmaster Central days, Vanessa Fox notes that the sitelinks are generated according to an algorithm.

Another finding seems to be that Google is serving up different results depending on your geographic origin. If you’re a major US player, the display of sitelinks might not hold for someone coming from Japan or the UK.

Some interesting food for thought in your site planning efforts.

We were talking about how paid search and organic search were converging, and the role of search engine optimization, even for PPC marketers.

Some examples of the convergence of SEO and PPC:

You can study your top converting PPC keywords and develop content pages based around them to attract organic traffic. (One of the strategies that Aaron Wall mentions in SEO Book).

In addition, I use the reverse method: Looking at the high traffic (and more importantly, converting!) keywords from either my AWStats account or Google Analytics from my niche blogs or HTML content sites, and creating PPC campaigns based on them (Highly targeted traffic mechanisms like Google Adwords Placement Targeting tool -formerly known as site-targeting – let you take a crack at attracting traffic with sniper-like accuracy).

So with PPC-SEO convergence, it’s very much a 2-way street.

Some highlights from Wil:

Diversify to break out of what everyone else is doing: Most affiliates will use 1 or 2 keyword tools in their research process. Wil uses 7 or 8. He might have as many as 17 tabs open on his browser during the research process.

Some of the tools he uses includes:

• Microsoft AdLab
• Yahoo Site Assist (Google for it..ironically it’s a search engine UNFRIENDLY URL)
• eBay Pulse

And if you’ve been keeping up with SEO developments, you’d know that searcher mindset and intent are going to be key.

So in line with what I’ve been doing in demographic/psychographic profiling, Microsoft’s AdLab will not just let you harvest your visitors keywords, it will give you tools to understand the demographics – age, sex, education, location of your visitors.

Together with tools like Google Trends, and Quintura (useful for lateral keyword/thematic research), you can build a pretty comprehensive profile.

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I predict that going forward, smart affiliates are going beyond merely harvesting converting keywords in a product-centered model, and move closer to the visitor in a consumer-centered model.

To some it may not be an obvious difference yet, but it’s going to be something that separates the Super Affiliates from the regular affiliates, as PPC bid prices and organic search algorithms continue to weed out the weaker players from the market in a Darwinian game of “search engine evolution”.

Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds

One of the presenters, Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds didn’t fail to shine as always with his “SEO For the New Google / Yahoo! / MSN” presentation (somewhat wordy, but chock full of content as usual).

No word yet on whether Shawn will have the videos up, but you can download Wil’s presentation PDF.

Here’s what you might have missed:

An evolution of search engine ranking strategies from past to present. From the early days of meta tag keyword stuffing to the evolution to linkbaiting / sticky content now.

Wil’s advice?

Drop the tech-focused hard approaches to SEO and adopt a human-relevant relevancy approach, and the focus on business revenue (and ultimately, profit) should stand you in good stead too.

The relevancy theme should be no surprise, with a theme-based approach making for a tight silo approach to site construction (building on the hierarchical vs spoke site architecture Wil spoke about during Affiliate Summit East earlier in the year)

Assets too will play a vital part in your site ranking strategy. Think relevance and providing value to visitors and readers:

If you need a primer on assets, check out my earlier post “Building Your Internet Marketing Asset Base”

Besides building your assets, you need to know how to effectively utlize them as well, this is where your skill as a marketer and a social networker (the human interaction side of Web2.0) comes in.

What I found particularly was this heatmap Wil included:

You might not be able to see this, but assuming the heatmap is labelled from hot (the most popular) to the coolest, in order of popularity, the hottest are:

• Video result (with thumbnail): Result #2
• Organic search result #1
• Organic search result #3
• Paid Search ad block (positioned above the organic results)

This is a quantifiable study that demonstrates SEO gives a higher return compared to PPC (at least for the terms you dominate the SERPs with).

You can install a similar heatmap using Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis’ CrazyEgg service.

For more Affiliate Summit London presentations, you can check out the Affiliate Summit newsletter.

Now keep your fingers crossed that Shawn will upload the videos…

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For more insights, visit Seer Interactive and check out the Seer Interactive blog.

Wil is founder of Philadelphia-based SEO firm Seer Interactive and he focuses on marketing, SEO and analytics.

There’re a number of what I call SEO Snake’s Oil salesmen out there who will claim to help you rank for 1,000 keywords, but Wil has a caveat empor warning for those who might fall prey to these ruses:

I have been reading of instances in which some dubious SEOs will help you rank for terms like “divorce lawyer outrageous settlement los angeles”. But seriously, what’s the likelihood of someone typing something like that?

As Wil cautions:

He also highlights the danger of using just a single keyword tool, for example Google Trends for research into “shox” and “Nike Shox”:

While another tool might give you vastly different results:

“Nike shox” is marked in yellow, while “shox” is marked in blue.

Most affiliate marketers and those involved in affiliate marketing might not spend too much time thinking about your site architecture, but it can make a difference in your ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Here are 2 models, Wil’s presented:

The hierarchical and wheel/spoke site architecture will have vastly different implications on your rankings:

And he highlights the need for a multi-tier site architecture for page importance weightage:

He also provides a number of linking strategies:

Emphasizing the fact that the ultimate aim of SEO is to build a human-usable site:

You can download a PDF of Wil’s “SEO Site Critiques” presentation.

Shawn has mentioned that the ASE videos will be available sometime in the near future, so you can catch Wil’s presentation then.

A contact mentioned that Google had updated Toolbar PageRank ratings last week.

I hadn’t noticed changes on my blog, but some of my content sites have done from PR3 to PR4. Fairly decent consider that they’re a little over 6 months old.

As mentioned in previous PageRank-related posts, take note that Toolbar PageRank is different from your Live PageRank which is registered at the datacenters and determine how frequently your site is indexed by the search engine spiders.

You can find out your Toolbar PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar.

But more effective than the Toolbar PR, which some would say is ‘old PR’ is the live PR, which can be accessed through the Live PR datacenter check.

Backlinks (one way links to your blog or website) determine PageRank.

If you haven’t already, the following are some of the methods to generate backlinks:

• Article Submissions
• Press Release Submissions
• Publishing RSS feeds
• Participating in blogging competitions

For new Internet Marketers, starting a blog might be an easier prospect.

But if you’d prefer to focus on site design and your concept, you can consider buying a high PR text link from a website in a related niche.

I’d recommend Text Link Ads.

I checked my Live PR at the Google datacenters:

My Google Toolbar PR displays a 3, though it may be headed to a PR5 at the end of this exercise. Some of my other sites look like they may be moving up a notch.

This is encouraging because I’ve mostly focused on a content-based approach (except for a brief period where I felt I was excessively focused on meta and H1 and H2 optimization). Looks like the organic route has worked out well.

If you’re like to check the Live PR for your sites from the Google Datacenters, check out the following:

• iWebtool PageRank Check

• Live PageRank

It looks like the PR score that iWeb reports from toolbarqueries.google.com might give you the PageRank that’s displayed on your toolbar.

Did your PageRank change? Share your results in the comments.

Typical backlink tracers like SEO Elite and iwebtool give linear tabular reports.

What I liked about TouchGraph’s GoogleBrowser is the ability to visualize the links in 3D.

Witness:

The GoogleBrowser is interactive, meaning you’ll be able to zoom in on a cluster, isolate inbound and outblound links and check out high authority sites you’re linked to.

Obviously, this tool has competitive intelligence functions in allowing you to

scope out the source of authority sites linked to a competitors site.

Alternatively if you’re an affiliate marketer, it gives you an easy way to identify other super affiliates marketing a product (obviously, they’d backlink to the sales page on the product owners site).

Does GoogleBrowser invalidate other SEO products?

Hardly. It gives you a framework to look at links, and more importantly analyze high authority site which are linked to you. It won’t easily replace the other features you’d find in Brad Callen’s SEO Elite, or provide the depth of information you’d find in Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.

[Thanks to Reefer420 for highlighting this resource in the WickedFire Guide to SEO thread]

The results are out!

The results aren’t exactly how I expected, but this is what I’ve achieved.

• http://www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com (you’re looking at it):

PageRank PR3. Current Alexa ranking: 116,781

(Fairly decent, considering I was PR0, Alexa 2m+ about 3 months ago).

• http://www.InternetMarketingCookbook.com (a content site)

PR0, Alexa: 818,262

• http://www.BizExcellerator.com (another content site)

PR3, Alexa: 718,908

I learned a couple of things from this exercise.

Tools like iwebtool.com are at best a predictor of PageRank.

According to their ranking, http://www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com was slated to hit PR5.

I guess the guess was way off.

Some of the participants at the Digital Point forums said as much, refering to such PR predictors as akin to horoscopes.

Well, now I know.

Perhaps the more interesting point is how InternetMarketingCookbook.com and BizExcellerator.com fared.

I’d been working on both of them at about the same time and they both have about 60 pages of original content each.

Then why did one hit PR3 and the other stay at PR0?

Here’s my guess.

Beyond just original content, it’s also the nature of the content.

For InternetMarketingCookbook.com, it was an aggregation of content, albeit original, of sorts.

Whereas for BizExcellerator.com, although the content was in a protected area, the content was much more compelling (Register for the free course if you haven’t already done so, at: The Best Kept Business Secret.

Is this the end?

Hardly, the Google updates can be expected about once a quarter and it is an ongoing process to build up your Google PR.

• This will ultimately help you rank higher in the SERPs.
• Bring in more traffic.
• Trigger your adsense, affiliate marketing or other Internet Marketing strategy.

Till then, the race continues.

And the wait is over.

To be frank, I have been mucking about with blogging till about a week ago.

That’s when Malaysia-based star blogger Gobala Krishnan launched his WordPress Adsense System. I call it my SecretBlogWeapon.

What is it?

It’s an integrated product containing an insider guide to the WordPress blogging platform, with all the plug-ins and templates to give you flexibility in developing a corporate, hobby or Google Adsense contextual advertising-optimized blog.

Speaking of Adsense, he includes the ‘Top 5 Adsense secrets you’ll ever need to know‘ and approaches to build niche content (which gives you greater traffic and income earning power) as well as methods to generate traffic and original content for your site.

There’re also other goodies like a comprehensive SEO guide and a ‘profitable blogging’ ebook.

All in, it’s great value and beats some of the products that I’ve paid more than double the price for.

Gobala mentioned that depending on demand the price might be adjusted. So do check it out now at SecretBlogWeapon.

As a bonus, having recently implemented it, I am available to help the next few bloggers who purchase it and have difficulty along the way (but not likely as the ebook is well-written).

If you have to plan to go Internet Marketing, be sure to bring your Secret Blog Weapon