EzSEO Newsletter # 146
December 17, 2006 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 146
Andy Williams
“Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”
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This week:
1. Handling “very similar” phrases.
2. CSS Mini-series Part III.
3. Affiliate Link Cloaking.
4. Other Stuff.
Hi again.
I went on a short holiday to Lanzarote last week, with the promise of a WIFI connection at the hotel, only to find it didn’t work. Worse still, neither did the WIFI at neighbouring hotels. It seems that the telephone company had not set up the area properly, leaving me with no internet – yikes!!! So, if you waited for more than 24 hours for a reply from me to an email, sorry. I got back to around 2000 emails, but fortunately my copy of Mailwasher soon removed about 95% of them.
OK, let’s get on.
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1. Handling “very similar” phrases.
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Someone on the SEO Website Builder forum asked a question that we all face while building our websites.
Essentially, this guy had built up a huge list of keywords, and found that for some of his phrases, there were lots of other phrases that were so similar, that building individual unique pages on all of them would not be possible. e.g. if you are selling dental insurance, you might have dental insurance in a dozen states of the US. Can you really build a dozen pages on dental insurance pages with unique content?
I would say that you probably cant. So what are the alternatives?
Well, my first choice would be to build a single page and theme it in the way we have looked at in the past. Using a tool like KRA (http://ezseonews.com/kra) makes themeing easy, and it will tell you exactly which words you need to include on your page. If the number of states you are targeting is quite small, there is no reason why you cannot mention those states on the page without it looking like keyword stuffing. Perhaps if you had 20 or 30 states you wanted to target, you could manage to write 2 or 3 unique pages, and mention 10 states on each page.
Now, in some cases, this strategy isn’t always possible. What I would then do is take a different approach. In the past I have shown you pages that rank for phrases that don’t actually appear on the webpage itself. This is because of the power of incoming links, and that is my second method of optimizing a page for “difficult phrases”.
Here is what I would do.
Write a quality article on dental insurance, and then create unique resource boxes for each of the states I wanted to cover. The text link would include the state as well as the primary phrase, e.g. “Ohio Dental Insurance”.
I’d then submit this article to a variety of article directories, using each resource box once. If I wanted to cover 12 states, I’d submit to 12 different article directories, each using a different resource box.
The next step would be to repeat this process with another article. Submit it again to the 12 article directories, but this time, change the resource boxes around so that no two articles submitted to a single directory uses the same resource box.
I do this juggling of the resource box, because some article directories are better than others. My top article directory is “Ezine Articles”, so I would want each of my resource boxes represented there eventually.
Just keep repeating this process, and eventually, your pages will start to become “optimized” for all 12 states.
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2. CSS Mini-series Part III
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In the last couple of newsletters, I showed you some simple examples of what CSS can do for your site. Now its time to learn how to do this for yourself. I’ll take it one step at a time, and try to make it as easy as possible to follow, but if I don’t explain something well enough, drop me an email.
Note: You do need a basic knowledge of HTML.
What you have seen so far is that you can change the basic look of your web pages by using CSS. This includes changing text attributes like colour, size, etc, and also affecting how your webpage is laid out.
For CSS to do this, you need to define a set of rules for each tag you want to modify.
Let’s look at the structure of a simple rule.
Each rule starts with a “Selector” that defines which HTML tag you want the rules applied to, followed by the various tag properties you want to change, and how you want to change them. The properties are included inside curly brackets.
Here is a simple rule:
h1 {
color: blue
}
This rule will make all H1 headers blue.
Here is another one:
H2 {
color:red;
font-family: Arial, Verdana, serif;
font-size:18px;
}
This rule will make all H2 tags red, size 18, and use the font family “arial, verdana, serif”.
Now, if you are new to this, I know what you are thinking. Lots of ways to modify a tag, but how am I going to remember them all?
Well, that is a problem, and one you’ll need to work at, but fortunately there is some fre.e. software that can help you.
Click on the Lite tab, and get Top Style Lite.
I personally use the Pro version of this tool, and have been for years, but the Lite version is perfectly adequate for beginners.
OK, before we continue any further with this, there is one more thing you need to know so you can begin to play around with CSS. Where do you put the rules so that your browser knows that it needs to modify your HTML tags?
Well, there are various places you can put them, but for this mini-series, I’ll just cover one – an external file.
To do this, create a text file and call it “styles.css”. You can then put all of the rules into this style sheet. Now, when you want to apply the rules to a web page, you just need to add one line of code to your webpage:
link rel=”stylesheet” href=”styles.css” type=”text/css”
Insert a “< " at the start, and a closing ">” at the end of this line. I could not do this here, as WordPress would not show the line. If anyone knows how to publish code in WordPress so it shows up on the blog, please let me know. Thanks.
Place this single line of code just before the tag of the web page.
OK, I think we have covered enough for today, but I’d like to finish with something you can try yourself.
1. Create a simple web page that has a H1 header on it.
2. Add the line of code mentioned above so that it will use a style sheet.
3. Create a text file called “styles.css”.
4. Add an h1 rule to the styles.css file to make headers “blue”.
Upload the web page and the CSS file to your server, and visit the page.
Does you h1 header appear blue? It should.
Now, modify the styles.css file to make the h1 header red, size 18, and font family “Arial, Verdana, serif”.
Upload the CSS file.
Go back to the web page again (or click refresh in your browser if you still have it loaded).
Does you H1 header change? It should.
Now, imagine you had a 100 page site, each linking to the styles.css file. You change the appearance of the h1 tag in only the styles.css file, and all 100 pages will be updated.
Are you getting excited yet?
Next time we’ll look at the most important selectors you can use to modify the look of your page, and you’ll get the chance to try out more of this for yourself.
This is CSS section is now part of a much bigger course available as part of the CSS Tutorial PDF eBook.
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3. Affiliate Link Cloaking.
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I have been a long-term admirer of Adrian Ling’s scripts, and use several of them in my own business. He is the clever guy that brought us Easy Click Mate for Clickbank merchants, and Easy Click 404. Adrian has recently released a new script that will help all affiliate marketers.
This tool is a link cloaker that does a little bit more than most. More on that in a moment, but first a home truth.
The truth about link cloaking is that in some cases, if someone wants to steal your commission, they will. At Clickbank, some merchants make it easy for your referrals to sign up for the affiliate program and buy through their own link. That means they steal YOUR commission. This happens a lot, especially in internet marketing niches, and no link cloaker will prevent this happening.
I therefore cannot recommend this script merely to protect your Clickbank commissions if you are working in marketing related niches. However, I can recommend it for two other very important reasons.
Imagine you setup a PPC campaign and send traffic to a merchant’s site. You pay for the traffic. Now, what if your merchant’s site went offline? You’d still be paying for clicks.
If this script detects that the vendor’s site is down, or, as is the case with some merchants, they change payment processor, it will:
* Automatically alert you via email
* Automatically switch over to your backup link
This means that your PPC money isnt wasted, since your traffic will be redirected to a different merchant who is online.
Now, even if you are not using PPC, you can use this script to setup all of your affiliate links on all of your sites, safe in the knowledge that your links are up-to-date. If a link goes bad, the script will automatically switch to an alternative, and email you so you can change the bad link. That’s priceless when you have links on hundreds of pages.
There are other benefits to this script, but you can read about them on Adrian’s sales page.
A note about this script – it does require PHP &
MySQL
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4. Other Stuff.
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I am not sure when the next newsletter will be published, since the next two Sundays are Christmas Eve and New Years Eve, so just want to wish you a very merry Christmas and New Year.
Since no-one is going to be reading my newsletter on these days, I may vary the timetable over the next few weeks, and publish it on different days of the week.
I will certainly be releasing Niche Blueprints this week – I’ll be releasing 2 this month, and will be offering them at a “Christmas Special” price that I think you will like 
), so if you want notifications of those, please sign up for the notifications at the bottom of this page.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
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The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2006 Andrew Williams. If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.
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