SEO

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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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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What the Mainstream Media Doesn’t Get about Panda

By Rae / May 22, 2014 /

It seems the mainstream media has finally caught up – not everyone who gets screwed by Google is a spammer getting his just deserts. MetaFilter has apparently been dying a slow and painful death as a result of the Google Panda updates. And, I’m sad to say a little part of me smiled. Am I…

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Google Propaganda, SEO and Why Marketers Need to Wake Up

By Rae / January 26, 2014 /

As the entire search world knows, Matt Cutts released a post last week – I’m paraphrasing – warning us that Google now considers “low-quality guest posting” to be spam under their guidelines and will begin to take action per those beliefs. I don’t plan to revolve this post entirely around that announcement. If you didn’t…

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Identifying the Money Keywords for Affiliate Marketing & SEO

By Rae / November 4, 2013 /

Keyword targeting can make all the difference revenue wise when working on SEO for an affiliate site that relies on SEO as its primary marketing method. You have vanity terms, traffic terms, and then you have your “money” terms. Seeing results from SEO takes a lot of work and a lot of time. So how…

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