Affiliate Musketeer

I have chosen to make my affiliate sites using WordPress – it’s free and infinitely scalable – which is just awesome.  I generally create them with custom themes that I have developed to suit each niche I’m working in.  Whilst doing this, I have come across three distinct wordpress-related problems regarding SEO but thankfully, they’re easy to fix (I’m no professional coder!)  The problems that are present in an out of the box WP installation are as follows:

1. The default link structure is a bit cumbersome.
   eg. www.affiliatemusketeer.com/?p=3
   As you can see, this isn’t very user friendly for your user nor actually for the search engine.  A more descriptive link structure works much better, for example:
   www.affiliatemusketeer.com/affiliate-marketing/550-commission-last-month-but-now-im-stuck.htmlFortunately, this is easy to implement and you do it within your WordPress admin screen under the ‘General’ tab and then subsequently under the ‘Permalinks’ settings.  Then all you need to do is click the radio button that allows you to specify a custom structure and past in the following structure:
   /%category%/%postname%.html
2. Remove /category/ from wordpress urls
   There is one other additional step regarding links and that is how to remove the /category/ from your front-end urls.  At this stage you probably have no idea what I’m talking about but you would see if you saved your permalink structure now (after following the instructions in 1 above)  that when you read your blog, when you hover over a post that is within a specific category, the url will look something like this:
   www.affiliatemusketeer.com/category/affiliate-marketing/550-commission-last-month-but-now-im-stuck.html
   As you can see, there is an extra, useless /category/ directory in the url and your url will be much more descriptive and effective if you remove this.

   To remove /category/ from your urls, stay within your ‘permalinks’ settings page in the Wp Admin and near the bottom you will see an input field for ‘Category Base’.  Set this to be ./      – yes, that’s dot forward slash.  This will remove the unneccessary and useless /category/ from your wordpress urls.

3. Add the Headspace 2 plugin for unique page titles and descriptions
   Out of the box, wordpress does come with some basic unique page structure functionality.  Because I like to know that every single page is doing as much as it possible can for SEO purposes, I like to have a little extra control and the plugin Headspace 2, found over at the WordPress plugin repository does just that.  Simply download the plugin, unzip it to a directory on your computer and then upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ folder of your wordpress site.  Once uploaded, go into the plugins admin section in the Wp admin and activate it.Once activated, you will see that on every page and post you now write, you have the option to add a specific page title and description.  This is great for SEO and you should always have your target keywords in both the page title and page description of every page or post on your site.
4. Search engine spiders can’t crawl your site
   Im actually adding an extra problem here which I cam across today on the Affiliate Project website which highlights how, out of the box, the default setting for wordpress is to ‘Block all search engines from indexing your site’.  When you install WordPress you are given this option right at the very beginning of your WordPres installation routine.  Its a radio boxed option that either ‘allows search engines to index your site’ or ‘block search engines from indexing your site’.  The default is to block them.

   Again, because wordpress is such an awesome piece of software, changing this (if you didn’t change it during installation), is easy.  Simply log into your Wp Admin and go to settings and then to privacy.  In the privacy settings page you’ll see the radio boxes again and can simply select the correct one – ‘Allow!!!!’

   This is a handy tool to have though if you don’t want google or the other search engines to come along and start indexing your site before you’re ready.  For example, I customise a lot of my themes and I only ever like to let search engines onto the site when I have enough good content up there for them to chew away at.

These four SEO changes are my ‘wouldn’t do without’ changes that I make to every site for maximum SEO effect.