Congratulations! If you’ve made it to here, you’ve chosen your products, built your Amazon Review site, created your initial reviews and are now live on the internet.
Now all you need are some visitors.
Unless you have a fortune to spend on advertising, your success at attracting enough visitors to make your site profitable will depend on those prospects finding you when they search for the products you’re promoting. That’s why you need to be on the first page of the search engine results for those buying keywords you spent so much time researching. And preferably in the top position on that first page.
To that end, there are three areas to consider if you’re going to give yourself the best chance of ranking well.
- Optimization
- Link-Building
- Content
Let’s look at each in a bit more detail:
Optimization
What this means is that you give as much help as you can to the search engines to assist them in ranking your site. This can start with your site’s name – the domain name. It should suggest what your site is about; for example, if you’re promoting cameras, a name like bestdigitalcameras.com or similar would be a good choice.
Next, put the product names in the headings on your page, showing that they’re the important phrases.
Then you should be sure to include your chosen keywords within the body of your site’s content. This is when your previous keyword research pays dividends. Sprinkle these phrases throughout your text, and the search engines will know your site is relevant within your niche. This process is known as on site, or on page, optimization, and is the first step in your quest for that top ranking position.
Link-Building
Search engines use a series of algorithms to determine what sites to show for any given search phrase. In the early days of the internet, they placed almost all weight on how many links a website had pointing to it from other websites. The view was that a site linking to you was a vote of popularity, and therefore, the more incoming links your site had, the more popular and relevant your website had to be.
Needless to say, this basic system of ranking sites was easily abused and a whole industry emerged to exploit it. It was a relatively simple matter to create programs that generated thousands of artificial links and to fool the search engine algorithms into ranking an otherwise unpopular site.
Fast forward to today, and things are quite different. The search engines have grown smarter and much more sophisticated. Backlinks are still hugely important in terms of ranking, but now it’s less about the number and more about the quality. It really is the case that not all links are equal; in fact, it’s now entirely possible that a site could get penalized for having the wrong kind of backlinks.
So how do you plan your link-building campaign and stay on the good side of the search engines? Here are some questions to ask yourself regarding any site you intend to seek links from:
- Will humans ever see and click on the link?
- Is the link likely to send any traffic to your website?
- Are the contents of the page that contains the link relevant to your business?
- Will the link to your website be of any value to readers of that page?
- Does that page contain outward links pointing to sites similar to yours?
- Has that page been indexed in search engines?
- Does the page rank well in search results for relevant keywords?
- Check the links to that page. Do they look respectable or are they from disreputable sources?
- Does that page link out to poor quality sites, indicating the possibility that they are selling links to all comers?
The big takeaway from that checklist is relevancy. The search engines are looking for natural links, so they place more weight on links from a site with similar or related content to yours. In their view, that site would be a natural source of links. And from your point of view, those links would be more likely to send you traffic. If the links were also on sites that had a degree of authority within your niche, so much the better. The absolute best result would be to get an authority site to link to you from within the actual text on that site’s page, rather than in the sidebar or footer. Those links are known as anchor text – you’ve probably noticed those phrases or words in blue and underlined on web pages – and they carry a lot of credibility with the search engines.
So how do you go about getting links in the first place?
A well-structured link-building strategy will encompass a variety of methods. Here are a few of the main ones:
Create Useful Content
If your site’s content is useful and of genuine interest to your visitors, they’ll be more likely to bookmark it, or tell their friends on Facebook and other social networking sites. These bookmarks are links to your site. You might also receive links from other sites in your niche, if their owners felt your content would be of interest to their readers. That’s why you should spend time making sure your reviews are crafted from your own, distinct perspective, and not just copied from elsewhere.
Article Submission
Your content doesn’t have to stay only on the pages of your site. You can create articles to distribute around the web. All kinds of sites and newsletters are desperate for content, and would be happy to publish a quality article – giving your site a backlink in the process. The obvious place to start would be article directories, but try to find directories in your specific or at least a related niche. Those links would be more relevant and you’d also have a better chance of other publishers in your niche picking up your piece to use on their sites. Be sure to include your keywords in the body of the article and your site’s link in the author by-line.
Blog Commenting
There are probably hundreds of blogs in your niche that you could place comments on and include a link back to your site. But be careful not to just post one-liners, or you’ll be accused of link spamming. Study your intended blog first to get a feel for the style of content and then submit a useful and relevant post. If you do that, your post will be more likely to stay up longer, and if you post enough good content, you might even get asked to provide a dedicated guest post or article.
Directory Submission
This is where you submit your site to directories that classify and list websites under appropriate categories. Many directories have policies on the type of sites they accept, and sometimes you’ll have to wait for them to assess your site before acceptance. But once you’re listed, it’s another good link in your collection.
Social Bookmark Submission
Again, submitting your site to the most highly trafficked social bookmark sites is another way of increasing your backlinks.
There are several other methods that can bring you backlinks, but it can be a long and tedious process to build a comprehensive portfolio of quality links. And you can’t let it slide. Link-building is something you’ll need to keep on top of to keep your site at the top of the listings. That’s why specialty link-building services such as WeBuildLink.com, who are experts in building the right kind of links for niche sites, are worth their weight in gold (and rankings).
Content
Finally, just a word about content.
I’ve already mentioned that you’ll find it easier to get your articles accepted at other sites if you create quality content. The same goes for the content you create for your site. Good quality content is what will get your visitors talking about you and referring their friends. It’s what the search engines are looking for and rewarding with high placings.
You need to put in place an ongoing content-creating program in which you add articles and refresh the reviews on your site at regular intervals. I can’t stress this point enough. You must keep adding content, such as new articles, to your site as it matures. This is how you steadily build your site’s authority and keep it high in the rankings. And with each new piece of content, you’ll need to build more backlinks. This is the strategy that will help to ensure a continuously increasing flow of targeted traffic coming to your site.
After reading through this article, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed at the prospect of such an intensive traffic building strategy. I wouldn’t blame you. Many niche site owners fail to realize the importance of an ongoing promotion strategy. It’s probably the main reason why most niche sites never make it into profit.
But really, there’s a simple recipe to having a successful niche review site. I can sum it up as follows:
Start with a profitable niche. Build a well-designed site. Post your reviews. Build links. Add ongoing fresh content. Promote. Keep building links.
If you follow that formula to the letter, you’ll have a winning site on your hands. It’s a proven strategy. And by now, you should be well aware that you don’t have to tackle any of this on your own.
Hyaroo.com can provide everything you’d want for a successful Amazon review site empire. And our partner service, WeBuildLink.com are the experts at link-building. There’s nothing they’d rather do than create and maintain an ongoing stream of quality backlinks pointing to your sites and sending them regular, targeted traffic.
But, as I said, you know all this. It’s time now we put it all together for you and started getting your empire launched.
