Traffic details would be a good starting point. Guest access to his analytics would be best but I'm not sure how standard that is in these things (probably not at all).

Uh, the most important thing is how much the site makes each month.

Either is a good starting point

Hey guys, what affiliate network(s) would be good to look into if I'm a new vendor for a service? Basically, I want to recruit affiliates and need software and for them to feel comfortable that they'll get paid. I'm guessing an affiliate network is the best way?

www.shareasale.com


I'm not saying traffic isn't important, but nothing is more important for making an offer than what the site is already making.

Sweet, thanks.

shareasale seems a bit expensive. $550 set up fee, 20% transaction fees, is this standard?

I'm not sure if it's standard. The company I do work for uses it. ShareASale is a super huge site and has a lot of good resources within it. I'm sure you can find cheaper, but they might not be as good.

Here are others:

www.cj.com
www.pepperjamnetwork.com

It's definitely on the high side, but there may be good reasons for it. Commission junction only lets you in if you have $1m+ revenue.

so i'm helping a health professional friend of mine with the content on his website and i decided to see what the #1 ranked websites for highly searched keywords by others in his field were doing right.

so i checked the title, tags, content, and so on and didn't see anything remarkably SEO-ish about these #1 ranked sites.

then i decided to go to http://www.wholinks2me.com to check what's going with their linking stratgegy and i'm seeing a lot of things like: few google links and a ton of Bing links



what's going on here?

edit: hmm when i type in forumserver.twoplustwo.com i also get lots of Bing backlinks but no Google ones. i thought something shady was going with these websites but now i'm wondering if i'm just confused.

Standard

google does not announce the links websites have for the most part.

also that site you linked to their results are pretty awful.

ok i went to another link checking site - http://www.bluebacklinks.com - and what it reveals with these doctor sites that have thousands of links to them is that 99% of the links are from other doctor sites that were created by the same website designer. so, a website design company called podiastristwebsitedesign.com (i'm making the url up) will be the designer for all the sites that are linked. ok, not 99% but the vast majority.

What are you asking exactly?

exactly? i'm not sure.

just trying to see if my hunch that something shady is going on is accurate.

i mean, basically, these websites i'm looking at don't have much much SEO-heavy content or SEOish domain names. they have very few links on their sites. they don't have blogs. and i can't imagine that they would have more than 10 or 20 sites linked to them through legit efforts. yet they're #1 on Google for the best keywords.

so i was wondering if there is something else going on to get the #1 spot. so i checked the links and was curious what you guys' instinct tells you when see like 6,000 to 7,000 links to them on Bing.

They have a lot of links. Those programs that show links often don't show them all. There's probably a lot of site-wide Blogroll links. It's hard to say without seeing the sites. You could also be underestimating how good the keywords are.

ok thanks. i'll pm you with more questions. don't want to take up the thread with this.

This just in, offpage factors are important in SEO! Especially for "highly searched keywords" of course people are going to be getting " non-legit" links. Not "shady" just business as usual for $$ terms.

Use webmaster tools in your Google account for your own site to find links and use OpenSiteExplorer to find competitors links (maybe Compete.com but you have to pay). No other services are even close to accurately indexing the internet well and fresh and formatted nicely. Yahoo Site Explorer used to be good with a few filters but they deprecated it recently.

Hey guys,

I made a website with a bunch of links to information I consider useful for internet based startups. It's not the best but I made it for my own reference and I am not monetizing it, promoting it etc. Just thought it might be useful to some of you. Link in spoiler if that's allowed:

@cwar I only found this recently but thought it was amazing and sort of not well known, do you know about it and does it look good quality to you?

http://www.majesticseo.com/

It's basically free and seems to do a lot of what SEOmoz does.

Majestic is very well known and the pay tools are amazing. Pretty much the main goto now that yahoo site explorer is no longer functional. Ahrefs is also pretty good from what I've heard but I've not used it.

Ah yes forgot about Majestic because I've never used it personally because they dont have API access until the 250 pound per month plan.

ah ok thanks for OpenSiteExplorer. i just used it and as i suspected the websites getting the #1 positions are getting linked to by all kinds of junk websites that apparently were created for the purpose of linking to others for SEO. looks like grayhat/blackhat linkbuildng techniques are probably the reason for these sites getting the #1 positions, since the content and metatags on these sites are nothing special/better compared to the lower ranking sites.

does anyone know of any graphic designers that they can recommend? i need someone to produce a logotype. i've wasted enough money on arabs on odesk.

I know a great graphic designer in Brazil who speaks good English, we use him all the time. PM me if you want his details.