Two Great SEO Practices for Affiliate Web Sites
Google is not too big fan of many types of SEO web sites. In fact, in a lot of cases, Google looks straight down at these sights - claiming that they provide no value on the Internet and that the whole field is filled with a bunch of search engine optimizers who sole goal is to refer a product to somebody and get a paycheck for it.
affiliate marketing tips
Now it is true, every affiliate marketer out there has an agenda to get you to sign up with or buy the products that they have listed on their site, and sometimes this can mean people only promote affiliate programs that offer the best percentage of pay (which sometimes means shady products). But there are still a lot of very useful affiliate programs there promoting great products.
These people do not have the time and money to put into marketing a web site that it takes to get to the top of the SERPs, they are too busy dealing with handling and creating their product.
This is where SEO's and affiliate marketers come in handy. They know how to get to the top of the SERPs and they know how to promote a product using the web and all of its capabilities.
Affiliate-Marketing-Cycle
What Are Some of the Key SEO strategies for Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing websites can be very complex, or very simple, though the marketing strategies for them seem to remain the same - and it all starts with the domain name.
People talk about domain names a lot in the SEO world and the special type of value an exact match domain names have. You see, exact match domain names help you to get to the top of the SERPs much faster and more easily for the keyword phrase that makes up the domain name.
This is very true, and exact match domain names can be very useful, but in the affiliate niche, I really find that the best types of domains out there are the "brand-able + one keyword" type domain names.
What is the major theme of your website? Out of all the keyword phrases that you are trying to rank for, what word do you repeatedly see coming into play over and over again?
This is the word that you want to put in your domain along - along with another "brand-able" word. Something that doesn't particularly have to do with your product at all, but something that will click in peoples mind and allow them to remember your web site much easier. The keyword will allow your website to rank for terms containing it a lot more easily and the branding word will make your domain memorable.
Links and Anchor Text with Affiliate Sites
It is very hard to get natural links as an affiliate marketer. Many times when you are promoting a product, there is only so much information that you can provide about your product on the web site. And sometimes this isn't the type of content that can intrigue natural links in the first place (this is the whole reason that businesses create affiliate programs in the first place).
For this reason, the best type of link building for a lot of web sites is manual link building - and in the affiliate world, manual link building means having control over your anchor text.
It is true that you want to diversify your anchor text, so that you can rank for all different terms and also so that Google doesn't think that you are trying to SPAM them, but you do want to make sure that you are using those exact match anchor texts quite frequently so that you can rank higher for those terms. A popular type of keyword phrase that an Affiliate marketer would want to rank for would be something like "best HDTV's."
Linking building can go a long way in the SEO world, especially in the affiliate marketing world, where building links naturally can be a lot tougher to do.
[note]About Guest Author:
This article was written by Philip Russell - who helps to run and maintain www.AcneCentre.com - a website that gives reviews for acne products. In his spare time, Philip likes to write articles about SEO and SEM.[/note]
