CalvinAyre.com caught up with SEO expert Dave Naylor at the Barcelona Affiliate Conference to discuss the importance of establishing a brand name when it comes to SEO rankings.
“Google is less likely to burn a brand than it is to burn some crazy, long term URL”, he said. He joked that it would take “big balls” for Google to ban 888, for example, as users want to see a brand when they search for it. “If you can get the right brand signals, Google will look more favorably on you as being something that is more legit than just a fly by the night website”, he explained.
The question is how can smaller affiliates with limited budgets actually go about sending those brand signals. Naylor advises to work in baby steps and identifying a niche part of the marketplace is step number one. To actually send brand signals to Google, Naylor recommends:
1) Sending mail drops that encourage recipients to search for your brand on Google
2) Attack main brands- “I will never work with [insert brand name] because of [insert offending activity], but I would work with [insert your brand name]
3) Take your efforts offline to newspapers and trade magazines and provide them with data- you can use these platforms to give Google data driven stats
4) Create promos around those stats
Naylor added that media links are the most valuable from an SEO perspective and unless its an advertorial, journalistic links are better than anything else in the world.
