Those better versed in the obscure art of SEO surely know what a site-wide link is. For those of you who aren’t all that familiar with the lingo: a site-wide link is one that appears on every page of a website, usually in a section (like a left or right menu which runs the entire site. The significance of such site-wide links has been subject to much controversy over the years, mostly due to its extremely volatile nature. A few years ago (around 2006), landing a much too large site-wide link (on a website with more than 1,000 pages) was considered a deadly sin for every self-respecting SEO. Some said that search engines penalized such links, others – and these guys were probably more sensible about the whole thing – were of the opinion that search engines probably counted such site-wide links as one – off the homepage of the site. A more elaborate approach preached that a site-wider off a 100-400 page site did not hurt, but something off a 20k+ page site definitely did.

For a while there, search engines didn’t seem to count site-widers as more than one link – I can tell you that from my own experience. Those days are gone though, and nowadays it seems like site-widers are not only not penalized, they’re quite beneficial. Again, a sudden hit off a site with 100k pages may in fact hurt your site, but this theory is indeed just that: a theoretical assumption.

The most interesting thing about site-wide links lately has been one concerning the relevancy of the websites on which they’re posted. Not so long ago, getting links off websites that were “related” to yours carried considerably more weight than links off some random site. For instance, if you had a sports betting site or a poker rakeback site, you were best off getting links off other sports betting sites and poker sites like poker forums or fan-sites. Nowadays, your competitors will trample all over you getting site-wide links off generic blogs, travel/fashion/whatever websites, buying them up en-masse. Apparently, indiscriminate link-buying is the way to go these days. The question is: is this a viable long-term strategy though? Had you asked me that a couple of years ago, I would’ve said no way. Today, I can’t tell you that anymore. As a matter of fact, judging by the direction in which things have moved over the last 2-3 years, right now I’d have to tell you, yes, it is. There’s only one obstacle I see in the way of link spamming currently: the quagmire that will develop when everyone starts using it.

Now, I’m not a prophet and therefore I can’t tell you with any sort of accuracy where web search will evolve in the future, so I can’t recommend that you start link buying and link spamming. Right now, it looks awful tempting though and it may in fact be the way forward for some time to come…

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Whether social networking is a fad, a mainstream phenomenon or the very future of the internet, one thing is certain about it: it’s here, it will stay and SEOs are already incorporating it into their overall strategy.

How much value is there in social networking for sports betting operations though? Let’s take a look at social bookmarking (digg, reddit etc.) first. The intended purpose of these social networking operations is to allow people to share their bookmarks, thus giving birth to clusters of interests, within which people are pretty much guaranteed to find relevant articles and links to various resources they are highly likely to value. While the intended purpose is lofty one indeed, things sometimes get lost in execution and that is exactly what happens in social bookmarking. The amount of spam that hits social bookmarking websites is higher each day, threatening to bury the whole shebang under piles and piles of self-promotional, meaningless bookmarks. There’s another problem with the setup too: the much-hyped traffic burst which some publishers boast to attain through social bookmarking only comes if a post gets featured on the homepage, it only happens for a short period of time and it yields mostly useless traffic which is little more than an ego booster for the webmaster whose site it concerns. Why is social bookmarking traffic useless? Because as a sports betting affiliate, you’re interested in conversions and not in people who jump in after having checked out a piece on the world’s largest pizza, or the 10 weirdest pictures from Russia, hungry for some more similar-caliber ‘entertainment’, and like it or not, that’s exactly the sort of traffic that sites like Digg and Reddit will deliver to your doorstep. If you decide to join the self-promoting masses and bookmark a few of your promotions or an article or two off your own website, you will just not be able to compete with the type of typical web-junk that I described above.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are a different piece of pie though. These sites actually allow you to target a social group interested in what you have to deliver. The only problem is that sports betting is not the easiest vert to promote through social networking either, and there’s one more thing: social networking promotion takes a lot of time and effort. You can’t just toss up a profile with a couple of links to some of your promotions and expect them to drive traffic to your pages. Social networking is like many of the online RPGs built to hog up as much of the user’s time as possible. If you intend to be a successful social networking marketer, you can’t stay on the sidelines and not get fully involved. You need to dive right into the fray and you need to like what you’re doing otherwise you will simply not find it within yourself to spend the required amount of time doing it. Like so many other things, if you’re not fully committed, your social networking efforts will only be met with failure.

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What is the most important factor when it comes to setting up an affiliate operation? The answer is surprisingly simple and straightforward: passion. You need to have passion for the niche you’re aiming for, otherwise none of the other factors like pay-out margins, gravity and conversion rates really matter. If you get into a vert just because you know it features great conversion rates and payouts, you’re not doing things right. Even if you find the diligence in yourself to research the vert, if you feel no passion for it, you’ll always be looking for opportunities and excuses not to do things you should do and that is definitely not the way to thrust forth an operation. In competitive niches (and most of those that feature great conversion rates and great payouts are extremely competitive indeed), sometimes fully dedicating yourself to the ‘cause’ won’t cut it either. With online marketers resorting to ever more cunning tactics, and with spammers never shy to throw their cheap tactics into the middle to make the search-engine environment even more treacherous for legit operations, you need to bring something special to the table to make it. That special thing can only be your content. In an oversaturated vert, it can be tough to come up with something truly original, but that is exactly what you need to try to accomplish anyway.

Content used to be the king of the internet, and to a certain degree, that saying still holds water. The only thing that needs to be changed is to insert “quality” in front of it. As search engines become ever more intelligent (although they never really seem to get this part right, there are steps made in the right direction, even if they’re sometimes followed by two steps backward, the overall tendency is definitely there), the importance of quality content continues to increase.

Now then, what are the pitfalls of quality content? According to the ideal search engine (which may someday be created by someone, somewhere) the most relevant result for a search is a page which contains information as detailed as possible and as point-specific as possible about a certain query. In order to rank high, you’ll have to match those criteria. There’s a pitfall here though, and it is best illustrated through PPC affiliates who have extremely high quality content on their sites. When the content is “too good” (yes, apparently there is such a thing) an interesting phenomenon takes place: CTR rates drop. People seem to find all the information they’re searching for right there, and that kills their appetite to go exploring by clicking on links on the page. Be careful however, these things do not translate to affiliate sites operating within niches like online poker and sports betting. There, because of the necessity to sign up with a third-party entity, players have no choice but to click through eventually. And the more information they get about an operation, the more likely they are to click through. Therefore, if you’re an online poker/online casino/online sports betting affiliate, DO NOT spare any resources that go into the quality and quantity of your content. There are other affiliate verts though which the PPC model fits marvelously. In such verts (I have a specific one in mind which I do not want to mention in this article) one needs to be careful about the spoiler effect of sharing way too much information.

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