How Can SEO Help Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign?

An article by Derek Dirks    Comments Off on How Can SEO Help Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign?

Affiliate marketing is a thriving source of income for millions of internet savvy individuals across the world. It’s a job you can do in your own time, at your own pace and from (technically) anywhere on earth with a stable internet connection. It can be difficult to make a dent in the affiliate marketing world though, especially for newbies. The competition is rife and is probably more informed, and one of the key tactics professionals will be using, which any fresh-faced young affiliate should stand to integrate into their own practices, is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Of course, it’s not absolutely necessary for affiliates to use SEO practices (especially if you’re already making more money than you know what to do with), but they could help you make even more money and much quicker.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and is essentially the practice of increasing your websites visibility on internet search engines by building links in an organic way. This is done through a variety of means, many of which involve blog posts which include a number of ‘keywords’. These keywords are used to anchor the site to a search engine, and as such, choosing the right keywords and implementing them in creative, quality content is very much the lifeblood of SEO. The primary (indeed effectively the only) goal of SEO is to increase traffic to your site, which is obviously very beneficial to affiliate marketers, as the more people who visit your site, the more potential clicks and sales will be made and the more commission you’ll make as a result.

How to implement SEO in your affiliate campaign

1. Make sure that the keywords you choose are relevant to whatever affiliate product or service you’re trying to market. For example, if you’re selling Television’s, the keyword could be something such as ‘cheap televisions’ or ‘hd televisions’. Essentially, imagine what you would type into google if you were looking for the product you’re marketing and work around that. It’s almost like reverse ‘Family Fortunes’ to an extent.
2. Check the popularity of your chosen keywords to see if they will be effective in bringing traffic top your site. You can do this by using keyword tools like the ‘Google Keyword Tool’, which will effectively measure how often your keyword is searched for. Make sure to try all combination of keywords you can think of and go with the combination that offers the best results.
3. Publish content on your site that makes use of your chosen keywords. Each post should be around 500 words (any more and people will be put off, any less and they won’t take it seriously) and should use the keywords in a natural manner at least 2 or 3 times throughout the article. Obviously in this instance, it really helps if your website is engineered towards whatever nice affiliate product you’ve chosen to market. For example, if you’re selling sports equipment, try writing a piece on some of the best sporting holiday locations or events.
4. Write some product reviews for the affiliate products featured on your site. In a lot of cases, users will specifically search for reviews when they are considering buying a product. Try to come across as unbiased and well informed, but don’t be condescending.
5. Build back links to your site by asking friends, colleagues and acquaintances (or other affiliate marketers) to post links to your blog and/or your reviews on their own sites. You could also build back links yourself by posting in public domains such as Yahoo Answers and Ezine Articles.
6. Stick to the rules set out by the webmaster. Google especially are constantly changing the rules when it comes to SEO practices so you should always make sure you’re one step ahead of the game. Google also operate on a ‘quality over quantity’ approach, so any sites with broken links and poorly written, superfluous content might be removed. If you want to examine the webmaster guidelines for yourself, simply type ‘webmaster guidelines’ into whichever search engine you will be using.

As we underlined earlier, it’s not strictly necessary to use SEO as an affiliate marketer, but it can be an undeniably powerful tool. If you can’t get your head around it meanwhile, there are hundreds of dedicated SEO firms online who will be able to help you out for a fee. It’s not rocket science though, it just requires practice, patience and just a dash of good old fashioned luck!

This article was written by Crispin with help from Clicksure and its affiliates.