Affiliate Marketing as an SEO Linking Strategy

Affiliate Marketing as an SEO Linking Strategy
By Promoting Webs

Affiliate Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are both important strategies in Internet Marketing. Affiliate Marketing involves placing ads on other websites and then paying a commission any time a visitor comes from that site and either requests information (lead generation) or buys a product. Affiliate Marketing involves tracking software which tracks which site visitors came to your website from. SEO is the process of getting good rankings with the search engines to bring a steady flow of interested visitors to your website.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO has two major facets. The first is on-page factors and includes optimization and changes to the website itself. This involves choosing the right keywords and using them in a way that it accurately tells the search engines what the website is about. The second is off-page factors. These include the quantity and quality of links from other websites, the age of your website, how long the domain name is registered for, etc. Off-page factors tell the search engine how important the website is and where to place it in the rankings. Today, off-page factors are more important in getting top rankings than on-page factors. It is with these off-page factors that affiliate marketing can have a big impact. Affiliate marketing can be a powerful one way linking source. When you have your own affiliate program, you give other web site owners the incentive to link to you. Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links and can greatly improve the link popularity of your site. If you have an affiliate program, make sure you get credit for your link popularity.

Affiliate Marketing

If you use an affiliate marketing service, most often the affiliate tracking software is maintained on the server of the affiliate marketing company. This means that the link comes to your site through a redirect from the affiliate marketing service. With a redirect, your website will not receive credit for this inbound link and therefore no link popularity benefit. So if you use a service such as Nettraction or Commission Junction, be sure you are able to gain the advantage of your inbound links. Look for sites that sell products or services that complement your offerings. If you sell "business services," a site that sells different "business services" would be a perfect affiliate. The goal is to find sites that already attract your target market, and can benefit from recommending your product or service to their visitors is the goal.

Affiliate Tracking Software

If you are willing to host your own affiliate tracking software on your website, your site can gain from the resulting one way links. By hosting the affiliate tracking software directly on your website, there is no redirect and the links will point directly to your site. Before you purchase tracking software you need to decide whether you want to run the program yourself, or whether you want to outsource it to a third party. Some of the affiliate marketing companies will manage a program on your website, but you need to check to see their software requirements. Many Affiliate Marketing companies will require that the software will support two-tier commissions. In a two-tier format, the primary commission is paid to the referring affiliate website. The second tier is a residual paid to the person or company who recruited the affiliate. This is an important aspect in affiliate marketing since building up your own affiliate network is critical to the success of your marketing effort. It is this same network that will give your website link popularity. In choosing a SEO compatible tracking software, stay away from those that use affiliate links that contain a "?". Many search engines will ignore URLs that contain a "?" since they consider these to be dynamic pages, you need to ensure that the affiliate script that you purchase generates static HTML pages for your affiliates to link to.

Linking and Content

As with any SEO linking strategy, the type of link that you get is very important. Graphical or banner links are less important toward link popularity than text links. Text links that use keywords in their anchor text (hyper linked text) give the highest value toward link popularity. To search engines, anchor text is very important. Ideally, the text links should be varied to give a more natural appearance. This is because a large number of identical text links will tend to be discounted by the search engines. Another great idea is to put together a series of articles about your product or service that can be used as content by your affiliate network. Supplying content in a building block fashion with a number of small articles will create content about your product or service that will differ from affiliate to affiliate and appear more natural to the search engines.

Conclusion

Affiliate Marketing can bring in direct business for a website and be part of your SEO linking strategy to get top rankings. The key is to host the affiliate tracking software on your own site. It is better to use text links and develop a process to build keywords into the anchor text and to vary the anchor text amongst your affiliate network. Choosing complementary websites is important for both SEO and Affiliate Marketing reasons.

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