Hey cardplayerlifestyle:
As I mentioned, I took your question and forum comments to the LinkedIn world to try to get some feedback from SEO’s in the online marketing world. This has certainly stirred up some great conversation. Just wanted to share a response in particular that you may be interested in… Hopefully this info is helping in some capacity:
If it’s a question about how long it takes to get PageRank, there’s no good answear to that, most of all because you might not get any (0), and it therefore will look like you haven’t got any yet. A good question would rather be “How do I get pagerank more than 0?”. PR points is one of the more obsqure SEO factors, both because it’s hard to tell exactly what makes you climb the steps, and how long it will take to get those steps registered and visible. Google does not update PR very often, so even if you’ve done absolutely everything right, it still can take months to get it confirmed by a raised PR value. Also, remember each page on your website might carry a different PR.
Yes, it’s true that PR is real value, confirmed by the fact that links from a site with high PR is far better more weighty than a link from a low PR site. Still I wouldn’t care too much about the PageRank factor, as this doesn’t necessarily decide who goes first in SERP. We’ve got a several year old affiliate site (Jackpot 6000 spilleautomat) that carries a PR2 for the front page, and PR1 for the most visited page (/jackpot-60000.php). We have been ruling the first place in Norwegian SERP for a long, long time now for the search term “jackpot 6000”, and that obviously isn’t a result of our PR points.
I think the most important factor here is that the domain name equals the search term, along with the page optimized for the same search term. Still we got pretty good positions for numerous other search terms, matching the search terms of each single page, some of them with PR0 or PR n/a.
I would not care to much for PR, but concentrate on the even more obsqure factor TrustRank, which officially are a an important factor, but a hidden factor. The TR builds from content quality, sitewide quality, internal linking strategies, domain and page age, and last but not least least external links.
Google says “content is king”, which I agree upon, but for affiliates it’s often hard to produce unique content, as there are a great number of sites trying to rank for the same search terms. I therefore would recommend focusing most of all on external quality links, which has shown to be more important than content. Why does get.adobe.com/reader/ rank #1 for the search term “click here”? Not because the content is optimized for this search term, not at all, but because there are a great number of external links with this text in the anchor text.
Last, when working affiliate sites where it’s difficult to get Google to pinpoint your content as really unique, I would also focus on the long tail. Like, when promoting slot machines, don’t only optimize for the exact search term “slot machines”, you’ll only drown in the heavy competition. Optimize for long tail search terms such as “play free slot machines”, “online slot machines”, “play casino slots” and so on. As you grow traffic and links with longtail search terms, it will also help build up the main search terms over time.
Use https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to check out which words people search for in combination with your main search terms.