SEO - Search Engine Optimization in Genealogy and Affiliate Marketing

Affiliates - whether you realize it or not SEO or Search Engine Optimization is very important to you and your site.

If you are new at this you are of course shaking your head saying I don't even know Affiliate Marketing yet now he tells me SEO is important! What is that!
I understand. Its not complicated let me explain.

When Liz of Ancestor Detective wrote a new blog on Friday titled How Many Women, Richard describing a hunt for the women in Richard Finlay's Life she probably had no idea that 2 days later she would be the number one Google Search Result and outrank the Google Results for a similar question - How many women has Richard Dawson kissed on "Family Feud"? (which I am sure was not the object of her blog post)


Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines don't care if you are looking for an answer to a genealogy question or for random Family Feud facts. What those search engines care about is who is talking about it - where on the internet. For some reason Google thinks that when we search for How Many Women Richard - AncestorDetective.com should now show up as the number one search result....for a variety of reasons which no one fully understands. The fact is that Liz wrote about this topic 3 days ago. The other question was asked in 2007. So Liz's question is newer and therefore most likely the best possible answer to the search. This is SEO.

Over time, your search engine standings will be based on what you are talking about and how often people are going to your site for those answers.

Another major factor in SEO is whether or not others are linking to your site. If you and you alone keep talking about your site then just you and Google or other search engines care about it. But if you are referenced by other blogs and sites that further develops your credibility and therefore you search rankings will go higher. (Today I am actually helping Liz's search results even more simply by talking about here post and by linking to it.)

Referring back to Liz's article we can try other search results.
Let's look at Richard Finlay - Google Search
I find the blog post on page 2 number 5 - so search result number 15.

What does this mean? Two things.

• If Richard Finlay is important to Liz and she wants people coming to her site she is search result number 15 so she needs to keep talking about him.
  
• But....don't over do it. If she puts Richard Finlay, Richard Finlay over and over and over again then what happens....she may show up no. 1 rapidly but could also drop out of the search results completely as Google will suspect she is practicing - what we like to call - Black Hat SEO - she is trying to game the system. It does not work affiliates don't do it. Over time it will completely kill your search results.

Instead, simply talk normally and include any keyword you are trying to rank high on with Google as you would normally speak. The SEO experts generally say that about 3 - 7% of your words should be those sought after keywords that you are trying to get ranked on.

What words should you try to get ranked on?
Any niche you are working with. For example I have a degree in Family History from BYU but my emphasis is Spanish so I would want to be sure to say Mark Olsen BA in Family History Spanish Emphasis if I am trying to get people to call me about Spanish research, which I am not trying to do at this time :)

If your expertise is London England and all its surrounding areas from 1890- 1923 then you will want to say those keywords as often as you can. Also in this blog right below where I am writing now I can place labels. Here I will place Affiliates, Genealogy, SEO, FamilyLink.com because those are what I hope Google Ranks me on after this post.

Of course I have just given Liz one more competitor, me, if she is trying to rank the highest for Richard Finlay. No doubt I will be higher than 16 later today because of this post. My guess is that I will be somewhere around ten or higher because I have typed that name so many times.....we shall see. Liz may also have an advantage in that she may have written about him before on her pages - this would mean Google will trust her more than this short article here by me today.

One item of note. Because the term 'SEO' is so sought after due to large firms such as SEO.com trying to rank no. 1 in Google for that search term I will likely never show up within the top 100 search results for such a term - unless I started writing about the topic each and every day probably various time a day. Remember that as you choose your topics - those that are really hot keywords take incredible amounts of time and effort to rank in - thus you should develop your own unique sets of keywords related to all we talk about in Genealogy. Surnames, Full Names, Dates, Events, Places, Locale etc.

I hope this is a helpful basic explanation and set of examples of what is SEO and why it is of importance in Genealogy and Affiliate Marketing.

Read much more about SEO all over the internet by just doing some searching.

UPDATE regarding my expectation that I would rank for the Keyword Richard Finlay - I am not finding it anywhere near the top of the list. It is in the search results but still quite low. I have edited my blog name to be OnlineGenGuy.com vs. ....blogspot.com which may be playing into it. But it is also a new blog vs. Liz's site that has been around much longer. OnlineGenGuy is now ranked number 19 for the phrase - How Many Women Richard which was my original pharse searched on for Rankings.