Online Marketing

SEO & AFFILIATE MARKETING BLOG

How to Make Your WordPress Website Secure (SSL) in 6 Steps

By Rae / July 19, 2017 /

If you’ve looked into search engine optimization as a promotional technique for your website, you have likely come across the advice to make your website secure (having an https:// appear in front of your URLs instead of http://). Google has been very vocal in pushing for all websites to make the move to being secure,…

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Google Search Console – a Beginner’s Guide to Finding Actionable SEO Tasks

By Rae / July 6, 2017 /

Google Search Console (GSC) can be a helpful tool – providing you use it. This guide isn’t meant for advanced users nor is it a comprehensive dive into every feature GSC has. I’m not looking to overwhelm you. Instead, we’re going to go over eight simple GSC features that can provide you with actionable tasks…

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How Bloggers Can Fix a Manual Penalty Caused by Compensated Content & Reviews

By Rae / April 13, 2016 /

This past weekend Google sent out a round of manual penalty notices citing “unnatural outbound links” – later confirmed to be targeting sites publishing compensated content and reviews where the blogger is linking out to the brand or site that compensated them. If your site received the notice, you’ll find some advice for fixing your…

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A Call for a Search Discussion – How Google Works

By Rae / March 31, 2016 /

If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I sometimes complain about the current state of the industry – most notably centered around what passes for research and discussion these days. It feels like people want to be handed the fish – with little interest in learning how the person with the fish caught…

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10 Simple Ways to Make Your WordPress Site Faster

By Rae / March 26, 2016 /

I’ve become obsessed with site speed over the last six months, systematically working through each of my sites to improve their speed. Supposed SEO benefits aside, the faster your site is, the better the user experience. And the better the user experience, the higher the conversion rate – sales, leads or newsletter subscribers; whatever a…

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What Happened When I Flipped a WordPress Based Site from http to https

By Rae / January 15, 2016 /

In mid-July of 2015, I decided to flip the Sugarrae.com site to https using SSL. In the last eighteen+ months, Google has been pushing hard to “make SSL happen.” They even said it might give you a bit of a rankings boost, no doubt knowing that tons of SEOs and business owners would begin flipping…

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Affiliate Datafeeds and Duplicate Content in a Panda World

By Rae / May 12, 2015 /

For those who aren’t familiar, Panda is a Google search filter that (in part) penalizes sites that have a large amount of thin or duplicated content. Panda has been a harsh filter for those using datafeeds in general – be they a merchant or an affiliate. As affiliates, we (and every other competing affiliate) obtain…

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How to Find Out Which Social Networks are Driving Your Revenue

By Rae / April 2, 2015 /

There are tons of social networks out there and only so many that you can focus (quality) time and effort on. One of the most common questions I see asked is “what social networks should I focus on?” and the answer is always, “focus on the networks that work for you and your demographic.” But…

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The Power of Channels for Increasing AdSense Revenue

By Rae / March 16, 2015 /

I don’t like depending solely on Webmaster Welfare (Adsense). I prefer to get my website income from multiple streams, placing the heaviest emphasis on affiliate marketing. However, we create our websites for users. That means that we focus on informing the visitor and not simply writing posts with the sole goal being to make money…

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