Article marketing is where you write a unique article and submit it to a large and highly trafficked article directory. At the bottom of the article, you have the opportunity to write a resource box about yourself, in which you can include links back to your own site.

After submitting your article to a directory, it is available for other people to look at, as well as available to other webmasters to republish the article on their own sites. If your article gets republished, you will obtain more backlinks to your site, which in turn should help with traffic and improve your rankings in the search engines.

How beneficial is it?

By submitting articles that include links to your site in the resource box, you are increasing the exposure of your website. Depending on how popular the article is, it can be republished by numerous high PR websites, which will heavily increase the number of backlinks pointing to your site. Similarly, an unpopular article will not do so well, and you may only get a handful of backlinks and see minimal traffic from the article.

Either way, there is never any harm in article marketing, as it can only help to increase the awareness of your site around the web. Results will obviously vary depending on how many articles you submit and how good the articles are, but overall the higher the quality of the articles and the higher number you submit the better.

If you only ever submit one poor quality article to an article directory, you shouldn’t expect to see any dazzling results. So it’s a good idea to write a handful of good quality articles for optimal results.

How do you do it?

The best article directory to submit to is www.ezinearticles.com.

EzineArticles is by far the most popular article directory, as it receives the most traffic and gives your articles the most exposure. So this is the best directory that you should sign-up and start out with when you give article marketing a try.

After signing up, you should start writing some unique articles related to your niche. For example, if your site is about Omaha poker, you should write interesting articles about Omaha. It’s a good idea to write general articles about your niche rather than overly specific ones, as the general articles are more likely to catch people’s attention and get republished on other websites.

The best range for word count for these articles I have found to be around 400 – 650 words. Whilst it is a good idea to write in depth and informative articles with good article length on your own site, for article directories you want to try and keep them short and sweet. You also want to break up paragraphs to keep them short enough so that people can skim over them. Bullet points and numbered lists also work well to catch readers’ attention.

The directories are full of people looking for quick information, so don’t scare them away from your article by writing huge chunks of text. Furthermore by keeping it short you can entice the reader to click the links in the resource box to find out more information.

After writing your article, simply submit it to the article directory and include a nice and persuasive resource box at the bottom, including a link to your site. Here are a few tips on writing a resource box. This is your opportunity to sell your site to the reader, so make sure you do a good job of it.

A few pointers

• After writing your article, make sure to give it an interesting title. You want to make this as eye catching as possible, because this is what is going to determine whether or not the article is worth reading or not.

• Write a unique and quality article. If your article is rubbish, it’s not going to get you anywhere. So put the effort in and give yourself the best opportunity to make your article marketing a success.

• Aim to submit at least 5 good quality articles to EzineArticles. This way you give yourself a good opportunity to get some exposure and analyse the results. If things do not work out how you expected, you can always say that you gave it a try.

Summary

Article marketing may not always be a raving success, but there is no harm in giving it a try. If your site is new, it is especially a good idea to try out article marketing so that you can increase awareness, and bring in a few new visitors to your site. Just make sure to give it a good go and you might see some great results. You will never know how well it could have worked if you don’t give it a try.

For more directories you can use to submit your articles to, check out the article directories page.

Don’t point to bad sites

Every time you link to a site, you are essentially ‘voting’ for that site. For example, if you did not know anything about SEO or the value of links when you started to build your site, you would only link to sites that you thought were useful. If you knew about a certain site that had some really great poker videos, you might decide to link to them from a part of your site so that your visitor could check out those interesting videos.

Therefore you will have linked to another site because you felt it was a valuable resource; which is essentially what linking is all about. Every time you link to another site, you are telling Google that you think that the site you are linking to has some value. So what do you think Google will think about your site if you are linking to low quality and worthless sites? They will think a lot less of your site if you are linking to other poor quality sites.

There is nothing wrong with link exchanges, but simply make sure that you link to quality sites, as you would do if you did not know anything about the value of links. Just as it doesn’t benefit you in life to hand around with the ‘wrong crowd’, make sure you choose your site’s friends carefully. It will do much better if you surround it with other successful sites.

Link with on-topic sites

When you exchange links with another site, make sure that site’s content is related to yours in some way. Seeing as you own a site related to poker, an exchange with another decent poker website or even a casino site will usually be fine. This way your links will appear natural, and will blend in well with rest of your site. If you start linking to gardening sites or whatever, Google is going to notice that something dodgy is taking place, and you may well get penalized.

Avoid 3-way link exchanges

A type of link exchange that many people like to think is useful is the 3 way link exchange. Instead of doing a basic link exchange between two sites, some webmasters like to get tricky and make a link exchange across 3 sites, so that none of the links are actually reciprocal.

For example, say your friend has websites A and B, and you own website C. A 3 way link exchange would be where site A points to your site C, and your site C points to your friend’s other site B. Therefore your site will be benefiting from the link from site A, whilst your friend benefits from the link to his site B from your site C, without their ever being any reciprocal linking taking place.

Whilst 3 way link exchanges aren’t the biggest taboo as far as SEO is concerned, they are basically trying to manipulate the way Google ranks websites, which Google is not going to like. 3 way linking is of course going to pop up naturally across websites, but Google will be able to easily spot when a site is doing it more often than what would be considered natural. So if Google catches you trying to manipulate your search engine rankings through 3 way linking, expect to be penalized.

Avoid 3-way exchanges with the big sites

Whilst you should try and avoid 3-way link exchanges anyway, this is a particular link exchange that is not going to be any benefit to your site whatsoever.

If your site has been online for long enough, you will start to get emails from link exchange companies or individuals working for some of the biggest poker sites. These people will often ask you for a link from your nice little site (preferably from the homepage or other major page on your site) pointing to their big site, in exchange for a link to your site from one of their very small sites that magically happens to have decent PR.

However, the problem with these deals is that the link you will be getting in return is usually worthless, because the site with already have numerous links to other sites, which will in turn decrease the value of the link you will be getting. So even though the site somehow has a decent PR, your link will be practically worthless because it will be coming from a low-content site that has been infested with links.

Many new affiliates are suckered into these 3 way deals because they see the nice PR on the site they will get a link from, and they are all too happy to give a nice link to the bigger site. But at the end of the day, the real winner is the bigger site, because they are getting a quality link from your nice new site whilst you get a pretty shit link in return.

If you get bored one day, try asking for a link from the big site itself, rather than the shit one that they offer. Watch as they reply in horror, or not even reply at all as you ask for your fair link exchange. They really won’t be interested at all from that point onwards.

Redirect from non www. site to www. site

When you create your website, you will find that your site will have two different addresses. You will have a site address like www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com. You can check this by typing in each version into your web browser, and you will notice that although your site is the same, you will have two different addresses pointing to your site.

So to help prevent any confusion with Google and to avoid any ranking penalties, it’s always best to redirect the one address to the preferred address of your choice. You can do this by entering the following code into your .htaccess file, which can be found in the ’public_html’ part when you log into your FTP client. The following code will redirect from your non www. address to your www. address.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]

Simply replace the ‘yoursite’ with the domain of your own site and you will be away.

Interlink your articles

To make sure that all of your articles get the appreciation they deserve, you should try and link between each of the articles on your site as much as possible. So if you have one article related to another, try and throw in a link from that article to the one that is related to it. By doing this you will help Google and other search engines recognise the value of your inner pages, and so it is likely that they will be ranked higher in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

For more information read the article on interlinking your articles < prime example of interlinking!

Use alt tags over images

Whenever you place an image on your site within your content, you should try and always use an alt tag. The alt tag allows you to write a little description about the image, and this will show up if the image does not load for whatever reason, or if a visitor hovers their mouse over the image. For example, try hovering over the image of the apple on the right…

Google likes alt tags because they help to identify what the image is about, and thus what the article may be about also. So it’s a good idea to throw a keyword into the alt tag over your images to help with your rankings for those keywords. But be careful not to cram in too many unnecessary keywords, and use an alt tag that helps to describe the image and works well with the keywords of the article.

An alt tag on an image should look like this in the code:

<img src=”images/image-name.jpg” mce_src=”images/image-name.jpg” alt=”Image Description”>

Write good content and involve your keywords

Firstly, always try and write the best content you can; because if you have lots of quality content, it makes it more likely that you are going to be able to get links. Not to mention the fact that your readers will greatly appreciate the information that you are providing them with.

Secondly, if you are trying to rank well for the term “Omaha Poker Mathematics”, make sure that you use this phrase within your content somewhere. If you write an article and never use the phrase that you are trying to rank for, Google will find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what the article is about, and so you may find it a little trickier to rank well for this particular term. So make sure you let Google know what you are talking about, and use your keywords in and about your content whenever you write an article.

On a side note, if you bold the keywords you are trying to rank for it will further help to identify what the article is about and assist with your SEO endeavours. However, try not to just go through your article and bold every keyword you want to rank for. Keep everything natural and use the bold tag if you feel that it will help with the overall reading experience of the article. Keep the reader’s interest at heart, and your rankings will follow.

Get more links

It was mentioned in our last article on the basics of SEO, but you can never get your hands on enough links. Keep writing content for other website for links, submitting to directories, submitting articles to article directories, using social bookmarking, and exchanging links… whatever you can to get those extra links pointing to your site.

Just be sure to keep everything above board and do everything in an honest manner. Every link pointing to your site is an extra vote for your site, and so the more votes you have, the higher you will be ranking in those search engines.

Throughout your site, you should always try and link between articles as much as possible. For example, if you have a handful of articles based on a similar topic, you should try and link each of these articles between each other. This is because inter-linking your articles has two excellent benefits.

Reader Benefits

If you have a visitor reading one article and they notice a link to another article on a similar topic, there is more chance that you will be able to keep that visitor reading and to hang around your site a little longer. This in turn will help the visitor realise how useful your site is, and so they are likely to come back to browse through your pages again to find more information, jumping from page to page. The more time your visitors spend on your site, the more likely it is that you will get a conversion.

For example, how many times have you spent hours on Wikipedia or YouTube just clicking from one page or video to another because of the related links that you are provided with? It’s crazy how many times I have gone to YouTube to just watch one video, yet I end up spending hours there hopping from one video to the next because of the related video links they are throwing at me. So try to do the same with your work.

If you own a WordPress blog, you should check out the Related Posts plugin that you can use to show links to similar articles on your site from each of your posts. It’s very handy.

SEO Benefits

If you are writing lots of articles, then you want to try and keep them ‘alive’ in your site by linking to them from other pages. If you write loads of articles but do not interlink them with other pages, they will simply get buried and almost forgotten about. So not only will your readers have a hard time trying to find your work, but so will Google and other search engines.

So with all of your pages, you want to try and keep them equally important in Google’s eyes. As you should know from the basics of SEO, Google likes to use links to help rank pages in order of importance. So even though these links won’t be from other sites, Google will still recognise the links and help rank the page you are interlinking to as more important. So if you do this between all of your pages, you will be helping Google to understand the importance of each of your pages and keep them ranking nicely.

A Few Pointers

It’s all well and good to go through your site and start interlinking those pages, but there are a few points that you should remember before you start adding links.

• Firstly, try to keep the pages that you interlink between related to one another. Don’t try and force a link between two pages, just keep them as natural as possible. Just go through your pages and see if you pick up on anything that you can link to on another part of your site. Let the links jump out at you, don’t force them.
• Don’t overuse interlinking in your articles. If you are linking to another page on your site in every other sentence, you are going to have a pretty colourful page full of links mixed with normal text, which isn’t going to look too pretty. Furthermore, I’m guessing that the majority of these interlinks will be forced, and your article will be pretty poor. So use it in moderation.
• Use anchor text when you are interlinking. Instead of having something like “For more information on poker mathematics, click here” with the “click here” part linked, try something like “For more information, read our article on poker mathematics” with the “Poker Mathematics” part linked. This will help Google to understand what the page is about and help the page with SEO and its rankings.

What is the Google Sandbox?

The Google sandbox is an unfortunate reality that the majority of poker webmasters are going to have to deal with when they get their new poker websites out on the World Wide Web.

The sandbox is essentially a term for when Google prevents a new website from ranking well in their search engines if they are entering an industry that contains competitive keywords. So this is going to explain why you will be receiving very little traffic from Google in the first few months until Google feels that your site is worthy enough to leave the sandbox.

The sandbox is in place to prevent awful spam sites from ranking well in Google’s search engine. Because there is some much money to be made in poker, it is a competitive market with lots of people creating poker websites everyday. Lots of these website are pretty poor and will not provide any useful information to the visitor, and so Google simple throws all new poker websites into a sandbox for a few months until they prove themselves to be quality sites. By doing this, the poor webmasters will simply give up, whilst the webmasters with quality sites will persevere and make it out of the sandbox.

How and when will you get out?

There is not really a lot that anyone can do to get out of the sandbox, its just something that happens to every website in a competitive industry at the start. Typically, the sandbox period will last for around 6 to 9 months, but this is quite variable and is just an estimate of how long you can expect to be in the sandbox. For my first site, it took me around 8 months before I saw any significant change in my rankings. I used to get most of my traffic from msn search (which wasn’t a lot), but since coming out of the sandbox the majority of my traffic comes from Google; so it was definitely worth the wait.

What can you do in the meantime?

During this period you should not give up on your site and wait till you are out of the sandbox; you should continue to work hard on your site everyday in preparation for the time you get out of the sandbox. This means that you should generate as much quality content as possible and build strong links as you go along. Its not going to be easy to build content and links for little results, but when the time comes for you to leave the sandbox you will be in a much better position to start making money.

Can I avoid the sandbox?

Not that I know of. Unless you are going to enter a different and less competitive industry, you should expect to enter the sandbox if you make a poker website. This is something that happens to every website, so don’t feel too hard done by. At the end of the day, it will make your life easier in the long run because you will not be outranked by awful sites when you are running a quality site with lots of good content in the future, so just be thankful for it and suck it up in the first few months.

Where can you get your traffic from in the meantime?

If you are looking to get traffic whilst in the sandbox, you are obviously going to have to look elsewhere other than Google. One of the best ways I found to get traffic to my site was to frequently post on a poker forum, and put a link to my site in my signature. Some forums will not allow you to do this, whilst others do not mind. I could get around 10 or 20 visitors a day from the forums alone, which helped me get a handful of conversions at the start whilst I was still in the sandbox.

However, do not spam your links anywhere, or post links to your site in random posts. This is the best way to get yourself banned from forums and get a bad name for your site from the off. Make sure that you make quality posts and things will be fine. Nobody likes a spammer, so make genuine posts and let the link in your signature do the work. Be a stand-up guy when going about business and you will do well.

How To Get Traffic>

I can tell you now; it will be worth the wait when you make it out of the sandbox. So just go about you business and build your content and links like you know you should. Make sure you hit the ground running when you get out of that sandbox.

Links can bring traffic in the form of people clicking these links, and more importantly in the form of boosting pages further up the search engine rankings. In general, the more links a site has, the higher it will rank in the search engines. So getting links should be at the top of your agenda (along with writing content) every time you sit down to work on your site. But this is always much easier said than done… because where can you get these links from?

Here is a list of some of the best ways that you can get links to your site…

Ask other webmasters for link exchanges

This sounds simple enough, but it will often be very difficult to get already established websites to link to your site. This is because new websites are unlikely to have any page rank (PR) or too much content, and so the bigger websites will not feel that it is in their interest to exchange links. This is why I recommend that you build up a solid website before targeting any of the major sites for links; you want to offer them a site that they would want to link to before you decide to ask.

Nonetheless, there are still plenty of websites out there that you can ask for links from. But remember, always try and personalise your email to the webmasters, and don’t just sound like another random person hoping to get a link. Make your email stand out with a unique title instead of ‘link exchange request’ so that your email won’t immediately be sent to the trash folder. Try putting a title of one of their articles in the email title and then discuss it briefly in the body, it’s sure to grab their attention.

Always be sincere and honest, and don’t try and be something you are not to try and get a link. I am always going to be open to the personal link requests, rather than the cold requests that I seem to get every day.

Article Submissions

There are a number of sites out there that are like giant article directories that will allow you to submit articles to them in exchange for links. This means that you can write a number of unique articles, submit them to different directories, and gain the links that point to your site when they are published. You are normally permitted to place a link back to your site in the footer of the article, and this article may also be republished by other websites, who will then also give you a backlink for your work. So one article may turn out to give you more than one link back to your site over time. Here is an example of an article submission website:

www.ezines.com

Furthermore, there is also a handful of gambling article submission sites, which will prove to be more useful as you will be getting a more relevant link to your site once you have submitted an article. The following sites are very useful gambling related directories that will allow you to submit your articles for links:

www.gamblingstrategyarticles.com
www.pokerzines.com

Article Directories>

Write content for other websites

If you browse around a number of poker websites for long enough, it is likely that you will come across a site that will accept content in exchange for links. This means if you write an article for them, you will be allowed to have a link or two within that article pointing to your website. These kinds of links are the ones that Google loves, and they are sure to give you a boost in the search engines. Furthermore, these links are completely free, all it takes is a little effort and you will be able to get a boatload of quality one-way links.

However, be sure to write a solid article for the website you will be sending it to, because the webmasters are not going to want to publish a shoddy piece of work. So make sure all you grammar is correct, and that all your information would be beneficial to the reader.

Content Writing Tips>

Offer up free content on your site

This is quite similar to writing unique articles for other websites as mentioned above, but instead you can write a set number of articles and include a link or two in them, and offer them to all webmasters that wish to use them.

You will probably find fewer takers for these articles because they are not unique, but you will find that there will be a handful of other poker webmasters that will take one or two and upload them to their site, giving you some handy one-way links. Furthermore, you can keep these articles on your site available to other affiliates, and you will have a constant supply of new links over time as people take the articles and use them on their sites.

As you can see, www.thepokerbank.com/webmasters.html offers free articles to other poker webmasters in exchange for links.

Submit to directories

There are a whole host of directories out there that will allow you to submit your site to be included within the directory. Some directories will not allow gambling websites, but there are still a fair number that do. If you do a little searching around you will find great lists of directories that you can use, and so if you submit your site to a couple of these a day, you will be getting a steady flow of incoming links to help get your site recognised in those search engines.

Summary

There a handful of other ways that you can get links to your site; such as leaving you link in forum signatures and such. But the above methods are free and are the ones that will give you the strongest links that will help your site climb up those search engines. But at the end of the day, a link is a link, and if you can get your hands on one then it is only going to help your site. Every link is another step up the big poker-affiliating ladder; the more links the merrier.

There are various places where you can pay for links, but Google is trying to crack down on this as best as it can. Especially as a new affiliate, you are not ideally going to have the right budget to be able to afford to buy links on other peoples sites, so you should stick to getting links in the ways mentioned above.

Purchasing links might be easier, but obviously it comes at a cost, and this is normally a cost that new affiliates cannot afford to pay. You can still be very successful if you get your links the hard way, and on top of that you will be able to feel a greater sense of achievement because of all the effort you have put into getting links when you site begins to rank well. So work hard, get lots of free links, and you won’t be going too far wrong. It’s a simple recipe for success.

There are many experts in the field of SEO that can go into a lot of detail about the best ways of getting your pages to rank highly, but all you really need are the basics to rank well. The more detail you go into, the less of an effect your changes are going to make to your rankings. So if you just remember and work with the basics of SEO, you will you do perfectly well. So here are a few things that you should ensure that you have on each of your pages to help them rank well…

Title Tags

Make sure that you have a different title tag for each page, and that each title is relevant to the content within that page. So if you have a page about how to play on the river in Holdem, you should shoot for a title like ‘Playing On The River In Holdem’. By having relevant title tags, search engines will be able to work out what the page is about and match it to the search term someone has used.

Don’t make the rookie mistake of having all your page titles the same with the name of your website. If you notice, every time you search for something in Google, you will find that a list of pages will come up on the front page; all with titles related to your search. This is no coincidence; as Google is looking for the most relevant pages and uses the titles as a guide, so make sure you have good title tags to compete with the other pages for the high rankings.

As a quick tip, capitalise the start of every word in your header. It makes it look much cleaner and will look more appealing to visitors when they see your title in the search engines. Page titles without capitals for every word seem to be associated with spam sites, and so people will avoid these a little more than sites with capitals for every word.

The title tag should appear in the head part of your html file, and should look something like this… <title>Your Page Title Goes Here</title>

Use Appropriate Filenames

Whenever you save a web page, make sure you choose a filename related to the content in that page. In addition, make sure you use dashes ‘ – ‘ in between words instead of spaces, as the spaces will show up as ‘%20’ in the address bar and make things look messy. You can use underscores ‘ _ ‘, but dashes look tidier and help Google to understand the page names a little easier.

So if you have a page about Texas Holdem tips, you should save the page as ‘texas-holdem-tips’. I prefer to keep all the letters in small case, as it makes things easier for the future when you are working with links around the site. If you use capitals here and there, you may find yourself making mistakes and having broken links around the site, which is never a good thing for SEO.

Use h1, h2, h3… tags

These tags are used to highlight important headers or information to the visitors, and so it will also show what is important about the article to Google. Typically, you should use h1 tags around the title of you article, and then use the other h2, h3 tags and so on around the sub-headings within the article.

So for a typical article about how to bluff, I would more than likely use h1 tags around a title like ‘How To Bluff in Texas Holdem’, and then use h2 tags around sub-headings like ‘Bluffing in online poker’ and ‘Bluffing in live poker’. The other tags like h3 I might use for sub-subheadings, but its not often that I will go below using h2 tags, although h3 may be useful from time to time.

For those that do not know, these tags look like this… <h1>your article title here</h1> , <h2>your subheading here</h2> and so on. Just be sure to only use them when necessary and don’t go over the top with the amount of tags that you use.

Use Meta tags

The use of meta tags was something that I forgot about for a long time when I first created my website. The main meta tags you should use are the ones for keywords and a description of your site. These will also help to define your website to search engines and visitors quite like the title tag will. The meta tags go within the head of a webpage, and will normally be placed just below or above the title tag. So your page should look something like this…

<head>

<title>Your Page Title</title>

<meta name=”keyword” content=”Keyword Keyword Keyword”>

<meta name=”description” content=”Your web page description goes here”>

</head>

As you can see, you will need to use a different meta tag for the description part and the keywords part. For the description, you should use something that will appeal to visitors when they read it, as the description part will accompany the title of your page in the search engines. So make it relevant to the article and as interesting as possible, whilst trying to make an accurate description of the page at the same time.

The keywords meta tag should contain the keywords that are most related to the article. So for an article about ‘bankroll management’, I might use keywords like ‘Bankroll Management Money Online’. Only the use the keywords that are actually contained within the page, because it is going to be useless to stick a keyword like ‘Bluffing’ in there if there is no reference to bluffing in your article. Keep your keywords to the ones that relate closely to your page, and make sure that you do not repeat any keywords.

Get Links

Links are very important for websites, because it is one of the key ways that helps search engines to determine which pages should rank highly. If there is a good quality page on the web somewhere, there is a high chance that other people will link to this page, and so this means that it is a sign of a quality page. So in general, the more links a page has pointing to it form other websites, the more likely it is that it will rank well.

Whenever you can get a link, you should always try and use your keywords as anchor text. This means that if you are able to get a link to your poker software page and you are aiming to rank well for the term ‘poker software’, you should use the words ‘poker software’ as the link text. For example, if I want my homepage to rank well for ‘poker affiliate tips’, I will try and get links using anchor text like this ‘Poker Affiliate Tips’.

As an extra tip, try and mix up your anchor text as much as possible, if you use the same anchor text too often, Google may get suspicious and penalize your page.

It is not always an easy process to get links to your website, so for more information on the various ways you can obtain them, you should look at our article on how to get links.

So those are pretty much the 5 key tips that you will need to take on board to help make your pages rank highly in the search engines. But always be careful with SEO, and don’t just design your pages with the search engines in mind. Always think about providing your visitor with a well-structured site containing all the correct tags, and your rankings will soon follow.

If you go overboard with all the SEO work and try and force the search engines to rank you highly with lots of keywords in your tags, you are more likely to get penalised rather than rank well. So keep it simple and keep it natural. Google wants to see well-structured pages with good content, so give it to them.

More SEO Tips>

But unfortunately, just because you make a website, it does not mean that Google is going to take your site into its search engine and start ranking you well straight away. I’m guessing that the majority of you that are reading this are currently frustrated at the fact that Google hasn’t taken your site into its search engine, and you want to find out how you can get this sorted out. Thankfully it’s not difficult, nor is it time consuming… that’s if you know what to do of course.

Firstly you can check if your site in indexed in Google by typing your domain name into the search bar, e.g. www.yourdomain.com. If the search results come up with a link to your site, then your site has been indexed. However, if the search result comes up with something like:

“Your search – www.yoursite.com – did not match any documents.”

Then your site has yet to be indexed, and so you are going to need to do the following to make Google recognise your site…

Get some links!

The reason why Google doesn’t index your site is because it doesn’t know it exists, not because they don’t like your site. Google wants to index as many pages as they can, but if there are no links pointing to your site then they will not have the chance to find it. It’s like building a house but not building any roads to it; nobody is going to know the house is there, let alone get to it if there are no roads leading to it.

So the key to getting your site indexed is to start building some links and give Google the chance to visit your site through the ‘spiders’ they send out to search the internet. These spiders essentially flow across the internet through all the links it can trying to find new websites and pages to add to their directory. So if you have links pointing to your site, there is a good chance a spider will visit your site and tell Google to index it.

Now getting links is always easier said than done, but you should have no trouble in getting your hands on some links if you put the effort in. There are many ways to get links, but some of the best ways as a new affiliate are to do link exchanges with other websites. Just contact the webmasters and ask for an exchange; this way you might be able to get some vital links pointing to your site.

How long will it take before I’m indexed?

The time is takes can vary greatly, but if you get your hands on a few good links pointing to your site it should take a few days. If you get a link on a popular site then it is likely that your site will be indexed more quickly, because Google spiders the bigger sites more frequently to look for changes, and so there is a good chance that they will happen upon your link and find your site.

Nonetheless, you will still be indexed if you get a few links from the smaller sites, but it will take a few more days (or maybe a week or two) before Google finally indexes you. But don’t stress out over it, take the time to write some more content and wait for the day your site starts showing up in Google. It won’t take too long honestly, so be patient… A watched kettle never boils.

Okay I’m indexed, now what?

It’s a great feeling getting indexed, but I’m guessing it’s not all that you might have expected. You may have thought you would see floods of traffic coming in, but this is not normally going to be the case. Your next task is going to be to try and make your pages rank as highly as possible in the search engines.

To do this you will need to do something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This involves modifying your pages and doing things like getting more links to help push your site to the top of the search engine results pages. This is something quite important that you are going to have to learn if you want to make your site a success, so take the time to browse over a few articles to get you on your way.

At the start however, you may have a few problems with in ranking well for keywords in Google due to the sandbox. This essentially a term to describe how new poker sites are not ranked highly for a few months until they prove their worth by sticking around and providing quality content to the visitors. This is a little something that all poker affiliates have to deal with, and it only applies in your first few months as an affiliate. You can find out more in the article about the Google sandbox.

The Google Sandbox>

Just because it’s going to take a bit of time to make it to the top, there is no need to give up. You have already taken the first major step by getting into the search engines, now its time to push your site as much as you can. You’re on the right track now; all you have to do is give your site some momentum. From now on as far as making money is concerned, the sky’s the limit.