Part 1 - Content is king

Introduction
After a conversation I had with Jay last night, I thought I'd share with you all a few hints and tips to bring in some extra money next year. Basically I work for an online bookmakers and all these tips are used in our marketing, development and planning but they can stretch to anything such as selling books and products online, comparing credit card prices etc.

What is an affiliate
An affiliate is someone who introduces someone to a product or service where they will spend money. An example could be I have a website on gardening and I advertise gardening books on that website which are available through amazon. If a user see's my site and wants to buy one of those books, they click on the link and are redirected to amazon (with my affiliate tag linked in the URL). If amazon then sell the user that book, I get a certain percentage of the cost as I introduced the buyer to amazon. This is the basic principle for affiliates but they all work in different ways. Casinos normally work on 20% of the players losses so if I introduced a player to an online casino who signed up and lost £1000, I would receive £200 of it. There are shock stories of Saudi and Japanese businessmen who have signed up to casinos through affiliate links and lost millions of pounds making the affiliates very happy but these are few and far between.

Starting out
So what do we need? First of all, you need an idea of what you want to sell or what service you want to provide. Theres no point creating a site that tries to do everything as unless you plan to spend all of your waking moments on it, its just not possible. So first of all, you need a clear idea of what your going to do.
Heres my normal thought process:

Online Gambling
Online Gambling > casinos
Do I want to include poker or sports betting? no
Do I want to stick to one geographical area? yes - UK
How much time will I spend on the site? 20 hours to build and then 5 hours per week
Will I do email marketing? Yes

After this initial thought process, its then that we start to design and think about the website / email templates / other areas.

website design
Ok, for this example, I'm going to create a website to promote UK casinos. There are two rules to remember:
1) Content is King
2) Content is King

It doesn't matter how your site looks (although visually pleasing will get you a higher conversion rate) but it does matter about content because search engines love content, they feed off it and the more content you have and the better it is, then the more your site will be spidered and indexed by search engines and the more it will visited and the more revenue you have the chance of making.

For example, look at the following two paragraphs:

Download Bruce casino today to play the best games available.

Download and play on Bruce online Casino today to experience the ultimate in online casino gambling within a secure casino environment. Bruce Casino offers its players the chance to win great cash prizes, unbelievable bonuses and all using the latest online casino software with the sharpest and fastest casino games available in the UK.

If we look at these two paragraphs, they're both perfect English and can be read by users but when search engines read them, they're looking for certain things. If someone searches for the term 'online casino', with the first paragraph, they're getting a partial match for one of the words but with the second paragraph, they're getting 3 complete matches and multitudes of partial and permutated matches. Remember the two rules and you can't go wrong.

website tricks - layers
Obviously, with content being important, flash and graphics are not all that important but the layout of the page is. If we have a large logo at the top of the page with a flash banner next to it, the search engine spiders and robots have quite a bit of code to get through if they want to hit the content thats below it. For example,

check out www.freesoccerbet.com - after the body tag, theres 114 lines of code before decent content is reaced.

compare it with www.onlinecasinocheat.com - there are no lines of code between the body tag and the first bit of content. This is done using layers.
Code:
<div id="Layer1" style="position:absolute; width:590; height:125px; z-index:1; left: 5px; top: 73px;" class="normalblack">
By using layers in this way, I can place it in on the screen anywhere I like regardless of where it appears in the source. This also makes a difference to the user as all the content loads before the images or banners on the page giving the user something to read whilst they're waiting.

website tricks - dynamic content
To be honest, its very time consuming updating a static website and its static websites that search engines love. Search engines will not read anything after the '?' in a URL string so if I want a news page on my site to be spidered (http://www.onlinecasinocheat.com/news/news.php?cat=01), I could submit it but with the search engine ignoring everything after the '?', its pointless. So what do we do, turn all our dynamic pages static?

Theres a wonderful little thing called mod rewrite in the apache config which we can use to 'fool' spiders and people alike into thinking we have static pages. Heres how I did it:

1) Locate the '.htaccess' file (normally in the root of the website).
2) Add the following rule to it:
Code:
rewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule ^casino_news/([0-9][0-9])/$ news/news.php?cat=$1
3) develop the dynamic pages as normal using news/news.php?cat=01 with two digits for the identifier (01, 02, 03 etc)

When used, this takes the url
http://onlinecasinocheat.com/news/news.php?cat=01
and turns it into
http://www.onlinecasinocheat.com/casino_news/01/

making it seem like the pages are static when in fact they are not. All links on the site to this page point to the latter static link and thats the one search engines will follow.

Hope this is help to some people, more coming soon including pay per clicks and email marketing.

Bruce