James does a great job of blogging about SEO, search and affiliate marketing at the InsureMe blog.  Here’s a pretty valuable post about avoiding SEO Landmines…

Yesterday Matt McGee shared some of the SEO lessons he has learned in his post SEO ?Don?ts?: 20 Fatal Mistakes You Must Avoid to Succeed. The post addresses some of the most common mistakes, scams and oversights that lead to classic cases of SEO fatalities. Some of my favorites (and most common affiliate mistakes) are:

1. Don’t reply to the SEO spam you get via e-mail.
6. Don’t waste your time submitting your URL to search engines.
13. Don’t ignore usability.
17. Don’t plaster your link all over blog comments, guestbooks, etc.
18. Don’t fret over keyword density.

InsureMe Affiliate Blog: 20 SEO Landmines that Could Leave You All Blowed Up.

Ah, Google.  I was one of the Americans weeping this morning that Kirsty references in this post…

There’s much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the American side of the pond this morning as several horrified Adwords advertisers wake up to discover they’ve been hit with a huge hike in their minimum bids. I’m not sure as yet if the UK has been similarly affected, cos noboby there has got up yet! *Update* - Yep the UK is affected too! Check out the A4UForum thread on this.

There’s a couple of threads running over at DigitalPoint and WebMasterWorld with the usual (understandable) emotional outpourings that accompany Google’s decisions of an affiliate-crushing nature.

I don’t have a great deal invested in minimum bids on my target keywords, but the money I had been spending to drive traffic had been paying off quite nicely.  I’m not sure that will be the case after today.  Definitely follow along as we figure this out.

Do you have any tips for dealing with the changes?

New Google Landing Page Algo Change - AffiliateStuff.co.uk

Wow.

Smashing Magazine has put together an incredible and in-depth look at what we know and don’t know about Google’s mysterious yet important Page Rank. Coverage of no follow, anchor texts, do’s and don’ts, and so on…

Everybody is using it, but (almost) nobody really knows, how it works. Google PageRank is probably one of the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web. With billions of existing pages and millions of pages generated every day, the search issue in the Web is more complex than you probably think it is. PageRank, only one of hunderds of factors used by Google to determine best search results, helps to keep our search clean and efficient. But how is it actually done? How does Google PageRank work, which factors do have an impact on it and which don’t? And what do we really know about PageRank?

In this article we put the facts straight.

This piece is clearly laid out, based on solid research and enough graphs to keep the ADD in us interested.

This is a must read.

Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It? - Smashing Magazine

Marketing and blogging whiz Andrew Wee takes us on a tour of Technorati’s new features and algorithm, and how that can help your niche affiliate blog and make you money…

If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you’d have heard of Technorati, the blog community site. They’ve recently revamped their stats and ranking system to factor in social factors. The net result? This blog has seen a jump in rankings, testament to the fact that social traffic strategies work.

Technorati Kicks Their Analytics Up A Notch at Andrew Wee | Blogging | Affiliate Marketing | Social Traffic Generation | Internet Marketing

For all of you link lovers and page rank junkies out there, this could be a particularly wonderful happening…

So it surprised us when Yahoo contacted us earlier this week to say that they are testing outside links from their home page. The goal, they say, is to make Yahoo.com as relevant as possible to their. By linking to outside websites, their hope is that the relevance (perceived or actual) of the Yahoo portal will increase.

Yahoo Experiments With Non-Yahoo Links On Home Page - TechCrunch

I’ve blogged about this before over on CostPerNews, but search engines love Twitter and Jaiku (micro-blogging presence platforms). Chris Pirillo backs this up with his own investigation…

Earlier today, I needed to find a post that I had written about OEMs sucking - so I went to Google to look for the OEMs suck post. The results blew me away - and you need to start taking both Twitter and Jaiku seriously if you haven’t already. Let’s look at the first organic result…

It’s an interesting post and it makes the point that you should be on these platforms if you are interested in spreading your web presence and allowing potential customers the chance to find out about your program, offer or platform.  Just don’t try to game these platforms, please.

Twitter vs. Jaiku - ChrisPirillo.com

Earner’s Blog has an interesting discussion on how to get the most out of the link sources out there. This isn’t for everyone, but if you’re looking for link sources, it’s an interesting read…

Ever since the Big Daddy update, throwing up an affiliate site then firing a few links into the domain sadly doesn’t work anymore. The “Supplemental Index” & “Aging Filters” are now an affiliate marketers worst nightmare.

Ultimate Affiliate Link Building Guide | Getting Links to Affiliate Websites

From the InsureMe Blog comes a tip about a free analytics program (similar to something like Google Analytics but without the scary big brother feel)…

Crazy Egg (yes, that really is its name!) tracks consumer activity on any page of your site, revealing:

* the source of each visit

* the total number of clicks on any given area of your page

* how that number compares to your total page clicks

InsureMe Affiliate Blog: Crazy What?!?

The age old question… should you slave over new and interesting content for your niche affiliate site, should you outsource the production of content to your 3 year old cousin or should you “rent” content from another source?

Ask 10 veteran affiliate marketers who deal with niche sites and content, and you’ll get 100 different responses.

Why should you even worry about fresh content if you are just starting your niche affiliate site?  Simple… the more you update your content, the more interested the spiders (automated bots) from various search engines will become in what you have to say.

The more spiders that “crawl” (index) your site, the more you show up in organic searches on certain topics.  If you’re dealing with a niche site, this is invaluable because the spiders will come back again and again if you keep turning out the content.

If you read an affiliate marketing eBook or attend conferences, you’ll hear a great deal about paying for spots in paid search results and keyword bidding.  While those ideas are important for getting your site up in the rankings, it’s more important to look at your actual content as organic traffic generally converts better than paid traffic!

One such service that provides content is Adfusion…

• Publish maintenance-free article feeds to your Web site that earn you money each time a consumer clicks on links within an article.
• Provide your Web site’s visitors with fresh, interesting and informative content.
• Build additional advertising sales around your newly expanded content inventory.

But (there’s always a but), you should be careful if you build your niche site’s content exclusively on rented or purchased content.  Search engines do frown on duplicated content, or content that is written explicitly for advertising purposes (pure keywords and little substance).  Those bots are smart.

So, like everything in life… moderation is the key to finding help getting your site’s content up and going!

Want a link in the blogroll of a fast growing affiliate marketing tips, tricks and hacks site?

Email editor@affiliatefortunecookies.com or leave a comment here if you have a suitable blog or site (no pharm, pr0n, yada yada) and we’ll set you up.

You have until 5pm EST on May 16, 2007.