How to Use SEO for Affiliate Marketing

Using SEO to Take Your Affiliate Marketing Website to the Next Level

Affiliate marketing, an arrangement where an online retailer pays a commission to a third-party website for traffic or sales generated by its referrals, can be a great way to make extra income for those who understand search engine optimization (SEO) or are willing to learn.

SEO for affiliate marketing programs, online methods meant to improve a site’s visibility in the search engines and draw increasing amounts of traffic, should be at the top of every marketer’s list of priorities. While paying to advertise a website on the search engines works, the visibility of the site only lasts as long as the money does. With SEO, there’s a lot of time, research and work involved, but it’s free and the benefits of using its trusted and tested methods on an affiliate website can result in a high search engine rank, and steady income for years into the future.

What are the SEO Basics Every Affiliate Marketer Should Know?

If you’re ready to set up your affiliate marketing site and offers, here are some SEO tips that will start you off in the right direction. While you won’t see results from your SEO marketing efforts overnight, with patience and time, you could achieve an impressive search engine rank, a sizable audience, and possibly even a stream of income.

Start with a Fast, Responsive Site

Remember that you are competing with literally thousands of similar sites promoting the same thing you are. Why is your site the best choice? First, and above all, ensure your website is as fast as you can make it. The longer it takes your site to load, the greater the chance that a potential customer will move on to the next site. Invest in quality hosting and ensure that your site is optimized in every technical way it can be. With an increasing number of folks searching the internet on smartphones and tablets, it’s crucial that your site looks good and is easy to navigate on any computer, laptop, or device.

Study SEO Basics

Teaching someone how to complete a marathon doesn’t do a lot of good if they can’t run or walk yet. Study search engine optimization to learn best practices and to avoid mistakes that could hurt your efforts. Learn what keywords are and what they do. Research the best HTML tags to use in your content to make it easier to read and search engine friendly. Learn to create powerful links. Study, use what you’ve learned, study your results, repeat.

Choosing Keywords Carefully

While it’s still advisable to use a brief, memorable domain name and short URLs, keywords have changed over the last few years. After introducing the Hummingbird algorithm to its search engine, Google brought us latent semantic indexing (LSI). In layman’s terms, it means the search engine ascertains what your post is about based on what you’ve actually written. Long tail keywords are more important now and, thanks to LSI, make SEO a bit simpler. There’s also a really great tool, LSI graph available to make things easier in your keyword research process.

Regularly Use Valuable Content

So many developers use SEO methods so well but populate their sites with content that’s poorly-written, generic, and rarely updated. One really great way to distinguish your affiliate website from dozens of others is to provide unique content of real value to your audience and update the content on a regular basis. Headlines of posts are of particular importance in this age of sharing on social media.

If It Sounds Too Good to Be True… It Is

In your research, you’ll discover many offers of low-cost, automated link building tools and inexpensive link building services. In truth, there’s no real way to cheat on SEO which makes these so-called tools and services not worth the money. Google and Bing have a strong history of ferreting out links from these schemes and tools and disregarding them. If you find one that seems to work, you won’t have to wait long for the search engine giants to figure them out. Learn to build quality links of your own.

A Work in Progress

SEO for affiliate marketing should be at the top of your to-do list as a promoter as much as social media for affiliate offers is. Have specific goals and measure your results as you work your plan. With time, research, and patience, you will learn how to help your website achieve a high search engine rank and produce steady, reliable income.