Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites
Note: Do make sure you bookmark this affiliate marketing tips on search engine optimization as you might need it for reference when building your current and future sites. Also, this blog post is long and stuffed with nuggets that comes with $7 to $97 ebooks.
In No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest, we went through site building tools for affiliate sites and types of site that you can build for your affiliate marketing venture. Now that you had your affiliate sites and draft contents up, I am going to teach you about search engine optimization for affiliate sites.
In this learning affiliate marketing article, you are going to learn almost all the search engine optimization nuggets that you MUST apply to your affiliate sites and all pages contained within. With these nuggets in place, you will be successful with your no cost affiliate marketing in the long run. 
Why Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites?
My guess on the reason why you chose the no cost affiliate marketing route is because you want to spend as little money as you can and search engine optimization is actually free of charge. It takes up your time and efforts but you will pay nothing for it unless you choose to outsource.
Another great thing about creating a search engine optimized affiliate site is that search engines bring targeted traffic and visitors that are more likely to convert into sales or leads. They also bring a snowball effect. The longer you are doing this, the more traffic that you will gain from the search engines in the future.
Prior Work for Search Engine Optimization
Many affiliates optimize their sites for search engines but are not earning the commissions that they are supposed to earn. Why?
Before you start optimizing your sites using the tips below, be sure that you have done your keyword research and market viability research properly. Without them, even if you are trying to rank or ranked highly for a keyword that you want, you might not be earning any commissions.
So, are you ready?
On Page Search Engine Optimization
Many people have done this mistake of not doing proper on page search engine optimization before moving onto link building. Search engines need certain elements to appear on your pages so that they can determine which keyword that your page should be indexed for.
Title Tag
Keywords between the title tags, <title></title> in your HTML, is the most important element for on page search engine optimization. You need to keep it short but at the same time include your core keywords. For the home page of your affiliate site, I would suggest you to use a broader set of keywords compared to deeper pages of your site.
Heading Tags
Heading tags, or commonly known as H tags are <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, and etc. seen in your HTML source. Initially, these are being used to structure a site and style different headings. Search engines use the keywords contained in these tags as a measure for relevancy, thus, you should have some of your keywords within the H tags.
Keyword Density
The frequency of keyword usage is not that important compared to the “old days”, however, it still carries certain weight. Do keep the keyword density of your pages around 3-8%. You must at least include three instances of your keywords. Yes, don’t write for search engines but you can have the three instances easily by writing for people. 
Avoid Mass Internal Linking
If you are blogging or plan to build a huge content site or authority site, internal linking is useful for search engine optimization purposes. Even so, you should not place internal links frequently and have link posts (weekly summaries used by avid bloggers).
Reason? You want people to click links that you can earn commissions from, not links that drive people round and round and eventually leave your site. My rule of thumb on this? One or no internal link at all is enough for a page.
Avoid Merchant Provided Contents
A lot of affiliate networks like ShareASale and eBay Partner Network provide affiliates with data feeds, which basically allow affiliates to post details of a wide variety of products on their affiliate sites. Some other affiliates also took the easy route of copying and pasting information that are found on a merchant’s page.
You need to avoid using them and scripts like BANS to pull these feeds out because search engines see these contents as non-value adding and some argued that the contents might be seen as duplicated as well.
NoFollow and Redirect Affiliate Links
For most of the time, search engines are against commercial sites, especially affiliate sites, even in their pay per click business models. There is no solid proof on this but the saying tells that you should nofollow all your affiliate links and redirect them using the PHP redirect method.
Off Page Search Engine Optimization
When you are all done with on page search engine optimization, it is time for you to start with off page optimization which revolves around building links.
Build LINKS
Off page optimization is all about link building. We will have a whole issue of digest on link building for affiliate sites but for now, keep this in mind, you need inbound or incoming links to rank for your keywords.
The perfect approach will be to get as many links as possible from sites with high Page Rank values that are relevant to your niche. However, getting links from relevant sites with high Page Rank values is hard. Thus, you should not let any opportunity of building links from any relevant sites slip through your clutches.
Targeted Keywords as Anchor Text
Apart from getting as many links as possible, you must make sure that most links are pointing to your site using the keywords that you are targeting. For example, if I want to climb up the search engines index for the keyword “affiliate marketing” for Aff Boom, I would use a link like affiliate marketing rather than AffBoom or http://www.AffBoom.com.
You must do a little mixing here as well so that your anchor text usage seems natural to search engines. Using AffBoom as an example, I also use anchor text like “affiliate marketing tips” and “learning affiliate marketing” sparingly apart from just “affiliate marketing”.
Where to Get Links?
In a nutshell, you can get links from almost everywhere on the Internet. Write and submit your articles to various article directories, utilize free blogging platforms like Blogger to link back to your affiliate sites, request for a link exchange with relevant sites and perform social bookmarking and directory submissions all help towards off page search engine optimization.
I will guide you guys through various effective link building methods for affiliate sites in my upcoming No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest issue. So, be sure to subscribed to Aff Boom RSS Feed for the latest update.
Number of Keywords to Target on a Single Page
Now you know how to optimize your affiliate site pages for search engines but the question that you are likely to have will be the above.
Well, I would say it depends on how many work that you are willing to do. Personally, I target two keywords using a single page. These keywords can have a slight variation such as between “make money online” and “earn money online”.
Using two keywords that carry the same meaning helps dilute my keyword density, avoiding the red flag from search engine robots. As for link building, I alternate the anchor texts on a ratio basis (6:4), (7:3) or even (9:1) to optimize for one of the keywords before moving on to another.
The best thing to do will be to create one page for one keyword. This will require a lot of work but it will definitely be worthwhile. Remember the old saying that is self explanatory? Do not keep all your eggs in one basket. Also, having as many pages as possible on your affiliate sites will help bring in more search engine traffic in the long run.
Subscribe for Link Building and Traffic Building for Affiliate Sites
Now you know how to optimize your affiliate sites for search engines and you also know that link building is crucial to the rankings of your sites on the search engines. So, where to get links?
You need traffic for your affiliate sites in order to send them to your merchants. So, where can you get those traffic? In my upcoming issues of the No Cost Affiliate Marketing Digest, I will focus on traffic building and link building methods that WORK, with no fancy methods, fluffs and fillers.
What are you waiting for? If you don’t want to miss all the tips, subscribe to Aff Boom RSS Feed now using the form below immediately.
Comments
5 Responses to “Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites”
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Yup., great tips. And you could not only implement this to a site , it works for blogs too… and I know it works much better!
Search engines love blogs due to frequent updates and improvised formatting. A newbie affiliate should start off site building with blogs as well due to the user friendliness of the functions.
pretty complete guide of “Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites”.
So what alternative for data feeds content? if I want to stay putting merchant feeds on my site, how to make the feeds not seen as duplicate content. Am I should put some original article content between those feeds?
Yes. You should insert your own contents before and after the data feeds that you are using. Continuously build links back to your pages as well to build up the authority of your pages.
This works well, very well in fact in blogs too.
Nice article. Keep it up.