Eric Nagel hosts the Early Morning Whiteboard session at every Affiliate Summit. This session is known for delivering serious value and happens twice at every conference. Everyone in the room is very serious about their business and improving their sites as it’s always the very first session with no other session going on. Most everybody else is still in bed from being out the night before.
In the first review Eric noted that the website designer should not have a link in the footer of your site. Take it out unless it is in the contract you signed for the design of your site.
Some sites accept guest posts. If your site is one, you should get a subscription to Copyscape and check for duplicates. Doing so, will save you from posting duplicate content that could penalize you in the search engines. Eric stated he even runs his own content that he writes, to keep from having content that is too close to what somebody else wrote.
Eric Nagel also recommends doing split testing with landing pages and advertisements. He states that Affiliate Program Managers are more likely to work with you if you tell them you are doing testing on your advertisements.
The Panda update on Google has hit people who offer great content but don’t know what they are doing wrong. Eric suggested looking at who’s linking to you. Links that lack quality bring your rank down.
Test your links and make sure that links don’t go to a secure link on your domain if you don’t have an SSL Certificate setup. Your page will throw an error message otherwise.
Eric suggested people who use WordPress should use a premium theme, or a theme that they pay for. That allows you to remove the link to the theme in most cases (don’t buy a theme that you have to link too).
Many people would benefit from skipping the previous night party, getting some good sleep and making it to this session.