In simple terms there are three pillars of SEO….

1) Code – Make sure your site is written correctly using clean code and META Tags, ALT Tags, Permalink URL’s etc.
2) Content – Have plenty of it! Unique and written for humans, not search engines.
3) Connections – The authority of your site measured by backlinks and the “page rank” of those links.

The first two pillars – “Code” and “Content” are classified as “on-page SEO”. These are, dare I say it, the easier parts of SEO. The parts we can at least make sure we get right and build ourselves. However, on-page SEO will only get you so far. You will always reach a stage where you need to improve your authority and the best way to do this is through building authoritative back links, ideally one way (i.e. not reciprocal and not on a links page) and ideally with a high page rank.

There are two schools of thought regarding backlinking. The first is that if you develop great content, the links will build themselves. In some cases this might be true but it could well take a lot of time. The second is to artificially develop backlinks via a number of means, some more underhand than others.

Some of the “grey hat” techniques for building backlinks are social bookmarking, directory submissions like DMoz, link exchanges, Squidoo and forum posts. Recent developments from Google around content farms have greatly reduced the effectiveness of  sites like Squidoo though. Another popular option is to pay for inclusion on press release sites. PRWeb and PR Fire are good examples of this.

Another popular option is outsourcing link building. Super affiliate kieron donaghue’s ContentNow offer this service. They will guanatee link transparency and UK links rather than spammy links associated with outsourcing linkbuilding to a number of Indian companies. However, ContentNow charge based upon number of email solicitations for links rather than actual guaranteed links.

Finally one of the most popular forms of link building is called link-bait. Perhaps one of the cleverest methods I have heard for generating back links for a bingo affiliate is detailed here.

Backlinks are always going to be an important part of SEO and the goal posts are always changing. You only need to take a look at Matt Cutts recent post on linkspam to see the measures Google are going to to stop people (and especially “thin” affiliates) from gaming the system.

As an affiliate, unless you have a big voucher code or gambling site you are more than likely on a retail based affiliate scheme and retail is SEASONAL. I’ve no doubt that my health site will pick up again in the summer, as people start trying to get the bodies toned for the beach. Google Insights for Search would appear to agrees with me but until then I need to hedge my bets. If you want to make a living out of affiliate marketing you need to have a portfolio of sites for all seasons, i.e. health for January, Mothers Day for March, Patio Furniture for the Summer. But most importantly you need to be geared up for Christmas. Whether this is Electronics or Toys, if you don’t have your biggest month in December then you probably aren’t going to be a successful affiliate marketer.

My first month was largely spent writing content, fiddling with the design and generating price comparison deeplinks manually. Any affiliate marketers out there will know what an arduous process this is and I will certainly be using Easy Content Units going forward! Or maybe a MySQL database if I really feel brave.

Month one saw me sell 10 products which was a strong start and gave me a taste for the powers of using on-page SEO alone to rank on page 1 of Google for low funnel, search terms. Something I now know as exploiting niches. However, my goal is to make this a much bigger site and rank on Page 1 for some of the bigger generic terms. I now find myself about half way through month 2 having already trebled my affiliate commission from month 1 so it’s been a great start but I now find myself with a nice looking, content rich site and very few backlinks. So I have commenced my foray into off-page SEO or generating authoritative backlinks with a high page rank (PR). I will save my exploits here for the next blog post but suffice to say this is proving to be the hardest part of SEO and somewhat of a dark art!

What I will say is that I am hooked already. I have been busy registering domains in other niches and have plans to expand and start outsourcing content production. Whilst I won’t be giving up the day job anytime soon I must say the earning potential has now become very real! Stay tuned for my next update.