If you followed through part 1 and part 2 of my Ultimate Amazon Guide then you should already understand how to create a well researched money site with quality content. Well, here is part 3 and it’s time for the SEO, probably the most exciting part of the process 🙂
On Page
The foundation for a well ranking web page is to have tight on-page SEO, without this it will make your backlinks less effective and you will probably need way more of them to get ranking where you want to be. Lucky for us, due to the nature of how Google works we only have to look at the existing top 10 sites for clues as to what is working in a particular SERP.
It may be that to rank high for some keywords Google likes to see a long in-depth article whilst others should be more to the point. Since it’s only an algorithm it can always be gamed, in the past that was by keyword stuffing. Of course since then Google’s algorithm has become much more intelligent but that doesn’t mean we can’t still maximise our chances by using certain words on the page, in titles and headings etc.
These days there is a lot of hype around WDF*IDF analysis, something which originated in Germany and since then many tools have appeared which calculate this, my favourite is SEOLyze. The basic idea is that it uses a formula to work out which words should be used on the page and how often, you can even enter your own money site and it will tell you which ones you should increase, decrease and which are missing.
It’s no longer enough to repeat a keyword phrase multiple times in your article if the rest of it is meaningless filler content. Google is smart enough to know which other words are relevant to that keyword and will reward you if you include them on the page.
For example, when doing an analysis for “best blender” it comes up with a graph displaying which words should be included on the page to show your content is relevant and worthy of being ranked highly in Google. Pretty logical stuff, check it out below:
best blender keyword analysis
Off Page
If on-page is the foundations, then off-page is the bricks and mortar which will really add the value to your money-making asset. If you build a solid foundation of on-page SEO you will probably find yourself ranking in or around the top 100 without any backlinks. When you start throwing powerful links at your site, that’s when you can really drive it onto the first page and beyond.
Step 1: Build Social Accounts
Pretty straight forward stuff here and this probably won’t help with rankings but it should add trust to your money site when you have the usual social accounts (Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc…). Make sure to create them, add the description, logo and then link back to your money site. The icing on the cake is to link them together with the Google+ profile. If you’re really serious then invest $20-$50 in a Facebook campaign to build a legit following for your fan page.
Note: I also create a separate Google Analytics and Webmaster tools account for each new money site (free sim cards help here).
Step 2: Share your content
There are plenty of plugins and tools to do this automatically but I tend to use Hootsuite to manage this, it’s not perfect but you can schedule posts to your social accounts to drip them out so you can set and forget.
Note: I now I use IFTTT to automate the sharing of posts.
Step 3: Order a Press Release
Another one that probably won’t help rankings but possibly helps for trust and certainly helps for anchor diversity is a press release. I like to use PR Whirlwind from BHW but there are many quality services out there which will probably have similar results. It can also bring relevant traffic to your site, I was recently surprised when a new money site made $500 in revenue purely from press release traffic.
Step 4: Build Social Signals
If you are a believer in social signals then you will want to carry out this step and build some, either with tools or a service. There are plenty of ways to do this, so I won’t go into it but I don’t think you need to go crazy here. A website about the “best bed sheets” is not realistically going to viral is it?
Step 5: Calculate the Optimal Anchor Text Profile
This one is tricky because chances are there is probably going to be some other affiliate sites that block robots or you will have super authority sites like Amazon, top10reviews etc ranking based on their authority rather than backlinks. Calculating an anchor text profile that works for your keyword is nonetheless a pretty important task in order to make the most out of the link juice that you drive to your money site. There really is no point going in blind and hoping for the best when all the data is there to see what works, you just need to analyse it.
What you should do is download the anchor text profile from ahrefs or majestic for each of the top 10 sites and then classify them into anchor types e.g. brand, URL, generic, exact and partial anchors. You can then use excel to calculate the ratios of anchor types and finally the average of all the sites in the top 10 (or at least the ones which have their backlinks crawled). Once you have this data, you just need to keep your anchors pretty similar to those averages and you’re going to see good results.
Matt Diggity has already made a fantastic post on this here which I recommend you read for more detail.
Step 6: Unleash the PBN Links
This is where the magic happens, I normally start off with around 10 links from my PBN and then observe the results and keep adding more until it’s ranking and banking. I don’t worry too much about dripping them slowly because they will be indexed at different times anyway.
Conclusion
Of course no matter what you do you won’t always rank, some SERPs might prove tougher than you expected or your PBN is not quite strong enough to crack it but if you follow through this guide you’re going to stand a decent chance of making some headway towards the top 10.
I'm Ben and I've been doing SEO for around 4 years. I believe in working smart in order to achieve your goals, passive income still exists but it takes a lot of work to get there and once you do, you should keep on building.
