Networking

I had a really enjoyable day yesterday, meeting some of the guys from TradeDoubler and AOL, and some other affiliates.

I picked some brains... and then had a few G&Ts so I was quite surprised I actually remembered the conversations.

All the affiliate networks I am with encourage us to get out there and meet other affiliates, merchants, etc, and since starting this mentoring scheme I have decided to grab every opportunity as it arises.

So today I have booked myself onto the A4U Expo at ExCel in October - getting that Early Bird discount with just hours to spare. It seems to be awash with related networking events but as it's costing me £179 (plus VAT - and worth every penny I expect) I may lay off the gins so I don't risk forgetting everything I learn. Then again, I may just take notes.

By Sarah, UK Broadband Finder

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

In my last post I mentioned the new broadband articles I had written. These were keyword-rich but I know search engine optimisation (SEO) is about more than liberally dotting the word broadband about the site (which, as it is a broadband website, it has enough of already).

I've worked on SEO before, particularly when I used to work for other companies and I got to spend their money on it - and I have also tried to follow the principles on UK Broadband Finder (adding keywords, not using Flash or images to convey content). But I knew I had got lazy with my H1 and H2 headings and that I wasn't making it easy for Google to spider down through my website.

SEO was one of the areas I spoke to AOL and TradeDoubler about - and Sanjeev Mirchandani, the Publisher Manager at TradeDoubler, has helped me out with an SEO checklist covering the basic SEO principles. He also had a good browse around www.ukbroadbandfinder.com and came back with feedback on what I'm doing right, and where I'm missing a trick. (Good - lots of content. Bad - little internet linking from within the body text, poor use of H headers).

So I've started work on some of the main articles, making SEO changes in the following areas:

1. including SEO keywords in H1, H2 and H3 headers
2. using SEO keyword phrases in the body text, particularly near the top of the page
3. adding internal and external text links (again, using keyword phrases in the link) to make it easier for Google to visit other pages on the website (rather than just relying on the surrounding page navigation)
4. adding new content
5. diving into Joomla and giving my main content pages search engine friendly URLs (eg http://www.ukbroadbandfinder.com/dial_up.html)
   

There's loads more to do - and now I'm worried I've added too many links and keyword phrases - but it's a start. Next step is to give each of my broadband packages a friendly URL (over 100 of them) which will take time but should be worth it.

By Sarah, UK Broadband Finder