Online marketing is evolving at an astronomical pace and one of the major influences in this change is Twitter, if you have any type of retail business selling absolutely anything and you don’t use Twitter to get the message out there you are seriously missing a significant audience.  One of my websites is currently getting 7% of its traffic via twitter thats over 200 targeted visitors a day extra.

The most recent innovation by Twitter is Twitter Lists, and believe me Twitter Lists are awesome. Once people have added your twitter to a list your  tweets may potentially appear all over the internet. They will turn up on websites and blogs and there is a great likelihood that they will send you a lot of targeted traffic.

Oh and a little tip (for anyone who could be arsed to read this far down) Twitter Lists make an outstanding addition to your research armoury whether you are a merchant or an affiliate make lists of tweeters in niches you are interested in and bingo instant ideas.

For example I’ve just started a list of UK fashion merchants and fashion bloggers http://twitter.com/#/list/KeithBond/uk-fashion and I expect it to prove to be a useful resource of ideas and another way of getting through bloggers block.

Continuing on from my post of September 14th I move on to the second search engine secret from that document of 1999, the year when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was the highest grossing film.

Secret #2 The little known secret to getting better positioning than your competition even they have the same identical keyword.

List your important keywords more than once on your site!!

Some of the major search engines will rank your website based on the relevancy of the key words used in the search engine. For example if your site sells Ray Ban sunglasses and the words “Ray Ban” are keywords listed on your page, your site will come up when a user searches on “Ray Ban”. And the same for a competitor site with the same sequence of keywords. However if you list Ray Ban not once but several times throughout the page, your site will usually get better positioning than the site who has it listed less times than you.

Many savvy web professionals list their relevant keywords as many times as they possibly can throughout their site because of this. You can also achieve this by listing your keywords several times at the bottom of your webpage, away from your main page, hidden and out of site. Maybe you have seen this for yourself on other websites. It may take a little longer for your page to load, but the extra attention your site receives because of the higher search engine positioning should outweigh the couple of seconds of extra downloading this causes.

So how can we use Search Engine Secret #2 in 2009?

First of all totally disregard the paragraph in italics, this today is considered keyword stuffing, when the article was written Alta Vista was the main search engine and that sort of thing worked pretty well, today if you are discovered using the technique you are probably looking at a Google ban.

As for the first part, still very wise advise in my opinion, but make sure you include relevant content too, include the keywords in key phrases in your title tags and heading tags, and mention them a couple of times in the body text too, keep the surrounding text relevant and contextual and as unique as you can possibly make it.

Hopefully that will help you move up a few places in the serps, but the Google algorithm is an enigma and there is more to getting good ranking than a few well positioned key words (and I’m certainly no SEO guru), but this is a better tactic than simply listing Ray Ban a few dozen times in your footer.

Tidying the garage recently I came across a document I had printed off on 6th June 1999 entitled:

“11 Power Packed Secrets For Using Search Engines To Build A Consistent, Steady Flow Of Traffic To Your Site”

Naturally intrigued I took a look through to see if any of it was still relevant, and was mildly surprised that amongst the dubious tactics which are likely to get you penalties these days were a few gems which can be adopted, adapted and utilised, over the next few weeks (months) I will revisit some of these gems of 10 years ago … * note I have edited out some of the waffle usually by putting …

Secret #1 What to “name” your site to draw traffic like a magnet.

The name of your site has a dramatic effect on the number of visitors your site receives. Let’s do a brief exercise to see how this works. Let’s say you are surfing and would like to find out more about accounting tax laws, and ways to save money on your taxes …

… take a look at the following website “titles” and determine which site you would click on first.

1. Waterman, Jewel, Rathburn Accountants Home Page Statewide Financial Management
2. Frank’s Accounting Practice. Accounting Office Reception.
3. Jealously Guarded Accounting Secrets The IRS Prays You Never Find Out!

Which one did you choose? Did you want to know more about the Waterman, Jewel, Rathburn Accountants Home Page or Frank’s Accounting Practice? I suspect like most people you probably wanted to know what the Jealously Guarded Accounting Secrets were. Of Course!!

The article continued in the same vein for a couple of pages giving several more examples.

So how can we use Search Engine Secret #1 in 2009?

At this point its worth mentioning that when the article mentioned to the “name of your site” it was referring to the <title></title> and not the url, this was originally published on www.hotyellow98.com/secrets.html (surprisingly the domain still exists although the content is long gone).

Basically the piece is telling us to be keyword rich in our page titles, today we can take that a step further and grab a keyword rich domain to suit, make sure the homepage has a good title and do the same with internal pages and posts.

Say you have a website about men’s flip flops you don’t want to choose an obscure name like Andy’s  Flip Flop Emporium andysflipflopemporium.com pick a name more fitting to what you are selling like Mens Flip Flops (obvious eh) incidentally mensflipflops.org.uk is available and there is nothing of worth on the .co.uk or .com “Mens Flip Flops” gets 9,900 exact searches according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Give your site a good title such as:

“Mens Flip Flops – Where To Buy Mens Flip Flops online”

and finally make sure your internal pages and articles have good titles too:

“Men’s Havaianas Flip Flops World’s Best Rubber Sandals”

Thats it for now hopefully I can get around to revisiting another ten year old search engine secret before too long.

If you want read more about buying domain names that are relevant to your niche take a look at the marathon thread on affiliates4u.com help and advice for newbies and people who need a kick up the backside in 2009 where Smingle (Frank Paul) gives a lots of sage advice, I suspect all his domain suggestions will be long gone but its not difficult to research your own.

PS: if you use mensflipflops.org.uk please link to my main Fashion Website.

For some time I have been pulling in the rss feeds from some of the very best UK affiliate marketing blogs and publishing them in an aggregated form on Internet Marketing Blogs, I set this site up simply for myself to use in January 2007 although I suspect one or two others do find it useful.

Last Saturday I decided to set up IMB with its own twitter @affiliateblogs, I mentioned it to my good friend Purple and he suggested automating the tweets by putting the rss feed through HootSuite, somewhat skeptical I took a look to see what was involved. It couldn’t have been easier to set up the account and plugin in the rss from IMB, maximum setting is 5 automated tweets / hour, so I put it on that, can always throttle it back if it seems too intusive or spammy.

Thats all there is to it, and so far it has gone pretty well, @affiliateblogs has picked up 300 followers in the week and at time of writing there have been 400 clicks through the twitter links.

The stats that Hootsuite provide are pretty good too here is the full week by click and location;

It also lets me know which blog articles have been most popular;

All in all a satisfactory first week, the jury is out whether I use similar automation on other projects but there is a fantastic potential, just hope Hootsuite keep an eye on their users to prevent it getting too spammy.

Ever wanted to submit your wordpress blog to a reader or blog service or even subscribe to someone elses blog, but felt that too much of it was off topic?

Well with wordpress it is possible to just submit or subscribe to the rss of individual categories.

All you do is navigate to the category you are interested in and add feed after the url.

For example;

Say on this site you are only interested in the Affiliate Marketing category

1. navigate to the appropriate category http://www.keithbond.co.uk/category/affiliate-marketing/
2. Add feed to the end of the url http://www.keithbond.co.uk/category/affiliate-marketing/feed and subscribe in your favourite reader.

Incidentally if anyone has a UK affiliate blog or a blog which is pretty general but does contain one category with an internet marketing / affiliate marketing slant let me know and I will add it to Internet Marketing Blogs which also has of yesterday has a twitter account @AffiliateBlogs which tweets new articles as they are published, this is set to a maximum of 5 per hour so you shouldn’t get over run although at busy times the odd one may slip through the net.

Another service to add the affiliate category of your blog to is the blogs section ofaffiliates4u.com simply click on the My Profile link at the top of the page and navigate to the blogs section and add your blog (or category) feed url.