The W3A Solution - Section 1 |
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Wednesday, January 07, 2009 |
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The W3A Solution - Section 1Page: 1 2 3 4 >> Table of Contents Section 1 - Background and main benefits Section 2 - Answers to frequently asked questions and essential information Section 3 - What is involved - the process Section 4 - Further information Introduction Thanks for expressing interest in the W3 Alliance (hereafter referred to as W3A). We welcome any feedback you may have regards the information we provide - whether it is clear enough and how we could improve it. It is a fine balance between giving you enough information and boring the socks off you! This document takes approximately 10 minutes for a full read. It is divided into four main sections to help you read and digest it at your leisure, each of which has an approximate reading time. You can navigate between sections using the links above. 1. Background and Main Benefits (reading time: approx. 3 minutes) Just a couple of sentences to put W3A into context and to introduce ourselves - further information on our organisation can be found here. We own and run the UK's largest independently owned affiliate publisher and price comparison site. This has become a very seriously sized business with 7 figure revenues to match. We also own Search Sciences, a fast growing Search Engine management (SEM) consultancy focused on building strong natural / organic search engine rankings through linking, content creation and content syndication. The leadership team have partnered together for many years on various projects, W3A being our latest joint venture and potentially the biggest of all. Between us, we have nearly 50 years of development, sales, marketing and senior management experience and have served our time in the 'corporate' world in some major firms including SSA Global (where we met), Pfizer, Bard, SAP and Deloitte. OK enough of the CVs. Why W3A We have launched W3A because, as those of you have built sites will know, there are a number of significant challenges in building a successful revenue-generating affiliate website:-
Lets take each of the above challenges in turn:- 1.1. Getting and Maintaining Product Information Since 1997, we have been building and refining a highly complex data management system involving multiple web servers, databases and hundreds of thousands of lines of code. This system enables us to deal with the product data feeds provided by the major affiliate publishing networks such as Commission Junction, Affiliate Window, TradeDoubler, WebGains, Zanox and many others, together with individual data feeds provided by various merchants. The net effect is that we now have a constantly growing database with hundreds of thousands of products from a huge number of online stores in some 80 main categories and approximately 2500 sub-categories. If you have ever tried to deal with the data feeds provided by the networks, you will know that the only consistent element is . . . inconsistency! It is a nightmare for an individual website publisher or developer to try to manage this data in a meaningful way. The W3A system uses this central Data Management System (DMS) to deliver theme-based product information to the sites that you choose (more on these later). The product data is 'cached' i.e. stored locally on the web server on which the site is running and refreshed regularly to ensure good performance and response times (this is particularly important when the search engine 'robots' pay a visit to index the site - many people's sites lose out because their database collapses under the strain!). Caching is managed centrally from within the W3A management environment. 1.2. Optimising the Site Endless books have been written on this subject and many of you will no doubt have a good knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). For those of you who don't, the ultra short version is that a website needs to be 'tuned' from both a technical and content perspective in order to make it attractive to the search engines and thus help it to achieve good rankings in the search engines' results for relevant search terms. The sites that we deliver to W3A partners are already optimised to a reasonable degree and for those who wish, there is the option to further tune them. Experts will, however, tell you that over-doing optimisation these days can have a negative effect - the search engines are far more interested in content and in "context sensitive links" (see 1.4 below) than in how well the site has been tuned. Which brings us to . . . 1.3. Adding Unique Content The product information that the W3A system delivers to the site will, in its own right, be unique in the sense that no other site is likely to have the same COMBINATION or 'slice' of products, nor will any other site be likely to present the products in exactly the same way or in the same sequence. That said, one of the biggest challenges of the affiliate publishing industry is that the product information provided by online stores will, by definition, be available to many different publishers. It is therefore ESSENTIAL that each W3A site introduces significant content of its own that is relevant and unique to that site. To this end, the W3A system includes a content editor that allows you to add content to each of the major categories of your W3A site, together with a manual covering not only the editing process but also guidelines, tips and techniques for creating relevant content. The more unique content that is added to each site, the better the likely long-term search engine rankings. We have also added RSS newsfeed capabilities. This allows you to add still further content in the form of articles or news items which can be picked up by RSS readers - another way in which unique content can be created and distributed. 1.4. Attracting Links We also run Search Sciences which is another venture that resulted from our core online businesses. As the online stores we represented saw our rankings and the links we had attracted, they asked us to do the same for them - and Search Sciences was born. Officially launched in the Summer of 2005, this business is based upon a Link Management System (LMS) which, again, we have been building and refining since the late 1990s and is now in excess of a million lines of web server code. LMS allows you to efficiently identify and trade relevant links with other websites in the 'natural' way that the search engines are looking for. It includes a link research portal that interacts directly with the major search engines' servers. As with the Data Management System, LMS is a highly complex distributed system which 'caches' data locally on your site and on the web server on which it is running. This removes day-to-day reliance upon the availability or performance of the central W3A systems. Again, full step-by-step instructions and support are provided. Use of this system also opens up further potential opportunity for W3A partners which is described in section 4. Search Sciences also authors articles for clients and syndicates these articles to the major article sites - an approach that is being widely touted as 'the' SEO approach of the moment. The major benefit of article syndication is that the article sites will allow you to include a relevant link back to your site at the foot of the article, thus creating a set of relevant inbound-only links. As a W3A partner, we can provide you with guidance and support in creating and distributing articles. The LMS system allows you to record and monitor the status of the links created as part of this process. Table of Contents Section 1 - Background and main benefits Section 2 - Answers to frequently asked questions and essential information Section 3 - What is involved - the process Section 4 - Further information Page: 1 2 3 4 >> |
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