Ok, you’re eyes are glazing over, I can tell.

On to the other news. Back when I was the VP of a Remote Viewing consultancy you wouldn’t expect things to get boring, but sometimes they did. I mean, you can only take so much of viewing whether company A will merge with company B, or describe over and over some heinous terrorist attack. One of the things we did to blow off steam was to hunt for lost treasure. You know the stories… stagecoach robbed, everyone dead, loot buried but no one knows where. We would dig up treasure stories like this and send our team of Remote Viewers to see if it was actually there… if it was actually true, and you know what? A lot of them are not true, or they are in a totally different location than the story states, or someone already found it, or… well… that inevitably leads to an adventure and many road trips.

That’s what my team and I did for National Geographic Explorer, which in fact airs Nov 17. Tonight. So, I hope you see it and I hope you enjoy it. At some point I’ll likely offer Remote Viewing workshops, so if you’re interested, send an email! Also, check out the website of Susette Smith.

Looks like they had some very intense SEO running to get those results, but they got ratted out by the article. Now all the fallout is occurring in the SEO world as we scramble to figure out exactly what happened.

A couple of things have changed, and they relate to:

• Exact match domains (EMD’s)
• Content Farms
• Spammy links or Low quality links (all the more reason to build your own link juice machine!)

One of the issues is a post I just wrote about exact match domains. With the new algorithm change these domains seem to have less value now, unless it is an aged .com. I personally know of some people who had new EMD’s that were on page 1, now they are no where to be found! So now it may appear that my posting is a historical document.

Ah, how times change so quickly in the SEO world. That’s one of the reasons I love it, because new holes that no one else sees will open up.

Anyway, it’s going to take some time to figure out exactly where the devaluation has occurred. But figure it out I will. Time to do some testing!

EDIT: Wow! A number of websites that I had been working on dropped from page 1 to… 60!!

Yeah, I know. This particular post is a bit off from local-y type SEO because I am talking about affiliate marketing, but it can be applied to local markets.

Ok… you found a great product you want to become an affiliate for. Something that is a good solid product you can stand behind. Let’s say it’s a book and it deals with, I don’t know, Forex trading. You did the keyword research but the main keyword, “forex trading” has over 60 million highly optimized websites. Then you did your competition analysis to look for holes, and it looks pretty darn bleak. So you opt for a longtail that has some search volume to it… not as much as your main keyword, but it’s still high, around 2,000 searches per day.

Now your challenge is: Should you buy a new exact match domain name, or an aged non-exact match domain name.

The bottom line is that you want to rank it fast, so you’re going to have to look at the competition and see what domains rest in that top 10 (at least!). You’ll also have to head over to godaddy.com (or some other domain registrar) and find out how many iterations on your longtail keyword are taken. If it seems like just about all of them are taken and a lot of those are resting in the SERP’s, but you still found a .org, dashes between words and all… pass it by.

In my experience, exact match domain names will do well if the exact match domains in the SERP’s are under a certain level. In other words, if you find that the competition is low yet there are LOADS of websites with your keywords in the domain name, then opt for an aged domain and create a directory with your keyword in it.

How do you get a hold of an aged domain?? Head over to godaddy and check their bargain bin. What you want to look for are domains that have some PR to them, but be careful and check that the page rank is real! (I’ll do a post on that another time). Finding a PR 3 website in the bargain bin, buying it, then finding out that the page rank was spoofed – sucks!

Ok! You found a real PR 3 and it’s something random like theredbirdsings.com. BUY IT!

The reason why you want a high PR site, one that is aged say 4 years or so, is because you can beat the heck out of it with backlinks and not get sandboxed… it’s that old Google trust thing.

So build your site and create a directory: theredbirdsings.com/forex-trading-tips. You will rank much faster than buying a new one. Believe me!

Backlinks are king to SEO ranking, but there is one very important aspect I see that is often overlooked.

Title Tags.

I have seen aged sites that have virtually no backlinks and little content still rank well just because they have the title tags set up correctly. In fact, I dealt with a client that was competing in selling POP displays. Their domain was about 8 years old, but for at least a year, they had little to no content, and had never engaged in a backlink campaign.

The competition was around 1.5 million competing pages and a lot of them were highly optimized for SEO. Interestingly, they were still ranking on page 3 for this keyword. You know why? It was the title tag and the fact that they had the “Google trust” of an aged domain.

So proper title tag set up will help with pushing your site through the rankings!

An Example:

Let’s say you wanted to rank for “fancy widgets”. You have to make sure that “Fancy Widgets” sits first in that tag.

Good:

<title>Fancy Widgets – Buy retail fancy plastic widgets at wholesale prices! – Smith and Sons Inc</title>

Bad:

<title>Smith and Sons – Retail Fancy Widgets at wholesale prices!</title>

Unless of course you’re looking to rank for “Smith and Sons” instead of “Fancy Widgets”.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run across companies that place their company name first in that tag, and rarely have the keyword in it.

After that, you want a call to action on fancy widgets, because this is not just for the search algorithms, this is for the people. This will give you two things. Driving the traffic to your site and allowing you to mix your keyword up a bit. In other words, go longtail. The only reason you’re doing this is to get click-throughs, so make sure you get an action verb in there.

After that it’s essential your copy reflect the keyword as well as what you’re offering.

You see, Google will crawl your site, see that title tag first, and then look for the keyword within your copy. Let’s say you have 500 words on this particular page. You’ll want “fancy widgets” in your copy at around 3.5% (I know there are differing opinions on this). You do more than that and you could be penalized for keyword stuffing. Just make it look natural to the user… make it readable!

If you did your keyword research properly, you’ll have also come up with a whole bunch of longtail keywords around fancy widgets. Get some of these in there too, because you’ll see your site rank for them along with your primary keyword.

So get to it! Go check your title tags and tweak them!