Affiliate 101

If you are just getting started with SEO, it’s important to know the basics first.  There are 100s of different factors that go into ranking a website in the search engine, and it can take you years to master them.  For those that want to get started now, you can do alot with little effort to greatly improve your rankings.

Most Important SEO Factors

• Keywords in the title tag
• Keywords in the URL
• Keyword in the body
• Keyword in anchor text
• Keyword in heading tags
• Anchor text in inbound links
• Inbound links from similar sites, and trusted sites
• Have unique content, and update the site frequently

Most Important things to Avoid

• Don’t stuff your keywords, or go for too many different keywords
• Don’t crosslink, or link to link farms
• Avoid stolen and duplicate content
• Don’t do doorway pages, invisible text, or cloaking
• Don’t have flash for your home page (it can’t be crawled)

A good resource that goes into more detail, and discusses the less important factors can be found below.

15 Minute SEO List – Learn how to SEO
Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist.