So I was sitting here thinking what I could write to help some people this week and I came up with an idea for an article that might serve as a useful tool for some folks. On the next few screens (or sheets of paper), depending how you like to read, I want to go through the ESSENTIAL skeleton that your site should have if it’s to have any kind of success on the market today. What I’ve complied is a TEN-point checklist that you should hold up to your site and see how it compares. The first point is…

1) Will my pages get a good Search Engine listing?

Search engines are a major route that people get to our sites. Google, Yahoo and MSN are all Search Engines that might be used.

There are many different tools and services that promise to submit your site to a billion and one places. That is really secondary – what you need to do is make your ENTIRE SITE as SE friendly as you can. The process for getting into the Search Engines is as follows:

a) You build a page, making it appealing to the Search Engines in a variety of 2 – 3 word phrases.

b) You submit that page to the Search Engines (there’s usually a link on the Search Engines FIRST page that says ‘add URL’. OR you link to your new site via a site that already gets regularly spidered and let your new site be found by the engines.

c) The SE will visit your page and determine what Searches you should be ranked highly under. NOW THEN! Your success in part ‘c)’ is TOTALLY dependent on the work you do on part ‘a)’ If you can get the ‘SE work’ right on your page then it will get you a strong ranking in the engines.

But how DO you do this? There are 4 stages to this process:

i) READING – study quality SEO resources. A good one is SearchEngineWatch.com
ii) RESEARCH – Search in any SE for a 2 – 3 word phrase, view the source of the top 15 – 30 pages and make notes as to why they have ranked so highly.
iii) ANALYSIS – Think about making a set of rules that you think you can apply to your pages that will get you a good listing in the SEs. It should say things like, ‘my pages need to have 75 words of body text’ or ‘my pages need 5 keywords in the Description tag’. It’s mostly an educated guess but you will refine it as time goes by.
iv) IMPLEMENTATION – Of course, the end aim is to apply your knowledge to your pages. Check all your pages have a unique TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORD TAG. This will make sure that the SEs will list them all as separate pages and you will get a bunch more hits.

2) Is my linked text whispering or SHOUTING?

OK, the idea is NEVER use the default blue link code on your pages on a black background. Make linked text bold and a completely different color than the background of your website.

3) Can everyone see my images… or just me?

What happens a lot of the time is that you have added an image to your webpage in a WYSIWYG html editor such as Front Page and it has added the image BUT it is loading it from your hard disk. This means that when the page is uploaded it looks fine and dandy BUT the only person that can really see your page is YOU!

To check to see if this is happening (and to check your images in general) MOVE or RENAME the directory on your local disk that DID contain the pictures and banners for your site and then preview the page LIVE. (Upload and then type the URL into your browser window).

Remember the golden rule on the final stages of your site design… TEST TEST TEST

4) Is there a traffic leak on my site?

Please make sure that you have no counters on your front page at all. The only things that you should have on your site (link wise) are BANNERS / TEXTLINKS and link exchanges. Don’t let your website visitors trickle away – get them into your site and hopefully off to your affliate program!

5) Have I exchanged some links?

Remember that although Search Engine traffic is very cool and can make a lot of money, the Internet is filled with a smorgasbord of weird and wonderful ways to drive traffic to your site! I want to mention link exchanges mainly.

If you have a new site then a link exchange, either with a large link list or directory, OR with some fellow webmasters who have sites similar to yours, can mean that your site gets traffic right off the bat!

I can tell you for a fact that there are a stack of Webmasters who are VERY into the different methods of traffic generation such as Pay Per Click, Article Marketing, Banner/Link Exchanges, RSS Directories, etc., – and they ALL work – they just require a little time, effort and know-how.

6) Is my site a Hare or a tortoise?

We want to get people to our sites and then provide quality information and education and then off to either purchase a product directly from our site, or on to an affiliate program’s site to buy. Now, this isn’t going to happen if your site moves as fast as a penny sinking into a jar of honey.

The Internet in general is not the fastest thing in the world and at peak times it can slow down a great deal, BUT there are a lot of things we can do to make file sizes smaller and to make things go with more of a ZIP!

i) Compress compress compress! – Shrink the physical sizes of your graphics RIGHT DOWN and ask yourself if you really need them. Remember that a text link can often sell or get your message across even better than a banner! Compress the image file size with a good shareware  or freeware program – we have 3 listed here at AffiliateRugu:

Multiple Image Resizer .NET is an easy to use and attractive image processing tool, that allows you to process individual images or entire folders of images at once. You can resize, crop, add borders, overlay text and/or rotate and flip images and dynamically preview the results for each. The processed files are saved to a new, user-specified directory and can optionally be renamed to a combination of the original name and/or numbers. The program handles a variety of input and output image formats including BMP, JPG, GIF, TIFF, EXIF, PNG, EMF, ICO and WMF and allows you to convert the images at the same time they are processed. Very nice program, with a clean interface and good documentation.

FastStone Photo Resizer is an image processing tool, that offers smart image resizing, as well as various other features, including watermarking (text or image overlay), cropping, (batch)renaming, image rotation, color adjustments and more. It includes some nice features like using EXIF data in watermarks, as well as drop shadow text and renaming schemes based on file properties.

Web Resizer enables you to compress, resize and convert your images, add a watermark, change the DPI, and also make minor image adjustments (brightness, contrast, sharpening). The program is primarily designed to process multiple images, but can also be used to resize or convert individual files. It supports JPG, JPEG 2000, PNG (8 and 24 bit), BMP and several other image formats. You can choose which actions to take during the processing, and optionally combine resizing with image conversion and other options. Web Resizer can also add a prefix or suffix to the output images, as well as an incrementing number. Other features include image rotation, resampling filters, color conversion (sepia or black and white) and built-in zip compression that can automatically create a zip archive containing the processed images

ii) Cut out any unnecessary Java script – it is amazing how large you can make an HMTL file with some weird banner rotation software.

iii) Load the images from the domain the html file is stored on. Many people have ONE domain where the images are stored and just reference them from there for ease and for organizational reasons. My advice – keep them on the same domain as the page that is loading them – it is MUCH faster!

7) Is the navigation on my site good?

TEST! Be a visitor to your own site, have you hubby/wife, mom, dad or friend visit your site. Is the progression through the site an easy one? Have you got *clear* navigational links on the first viewable screen? Do you take every opportunity to market while you educate or provide your service?

Remember that Joe and Jane Surfer will rarely make an effort to navigate a poorly designed site, so you need to make a special effort to get them to see what you want them to see!

Is your site going to get you into trouble?

This is a biggy! Don’t do anything that is illegal or show any material on your site that is not legal in your corner of the world. Pay attention to your local laws.

9) Have I made the effort to SELL on every page, WHILE I educate, inform and/or offer a valuable service?

Slapping a banner or text link onto a page of HMTL is just not enough to sell to our site visitors anymore. It might have been effective once, but now we need to do a whole lot more! Add text links or just plain text above or  below any banners you use, describing what is available on your affiliate program’s site. It will REALLY increase your profits! Make good use of text. Highlight key words and phrases within any articles or text which is offered to your site visitors as helpful information. Go one step further and link those key words and phrases to the appropriate product page or informational page of the affiliate program which best fits with the topic of your article or text.

10) Have I got this site organized?

Keep track of which affiliate programs are on which pages – you may need to change the program or the banners one day and if you’ve got 50 sites it can be a nightmare! Keep it in order by writing down a MAP of which program is advertised on which page

SUMMING UP…

In closing, you can even take my checklist and refine it to your needs but keep it together and take the time to get every little element of your site working together. That is how it must be for you to make money at this. And to that end – best of LUCK!

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