8 SEO TIPS FOR AFFILIATe SITE
1. Use a keyword rich domain name, but avoid looking spammy. The best domain names are short, contain your most important keyword(s), are easy to remember, and easy to spell. Bing in particular places a lot of emphasis on sites that have keywords in the domain name.
2. Invest in quality, unique content. Too many affiliates try to optimize a website that uses poor quality content pasted directly from a private label article, an offer landing page, etc. Unique content is a quality signal, and well-written content is much more likely to spontaneously generate links…which means it’s much easier to optimize a website with good content.
3. Add new content to your site on a regular basis. Adding blog posts to your affiliate site on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis is a great way to increase the size and scope of your affiliate site over time, ensure that search engine bots return to your site on a regular basis, and build an audience.
4. Beware of automated link building tools, cheap link building services, and other link building schemes. Google and Bing are pretty good at ignoring cheap links – automated or otherwise – and as a result automated tools, cheap directory submissions, bulk article submissions, etc. are rarely worth investing in. If you do find an automated tool, trick, or scheme that seems to work, keep in mind that Google or Bing will eventually figure out what’s going on and devalue those links. Therefore, work on building good quality links and leave the junk alone.
5. Follow these standard on-site optimization guidelines:
-Make sure the HTML title tag of each page uses 2-4 keywords, is less than 65 characters in length, and doesn’t contain stop words like “and, of, is,” etc.
-Use HTML header tags (H1, H2, H3), short paragraphs, and lists (UL or OL) to make your written content easy for readers to scan, and be sure to use keywords in these elements (just don’t stuff keywords where they don’t belong).
-In content links are the most powerful links on a page – footer and sidebar links have fairly low value. Therefore, some of your most powerful on-site links are from in-text links in your website’s articles or blogs.
6. Promote your affiliate site as if it were a big brand. Big brands maintain active profiles on important social networks relative to their products, they send out press releases using premium distribution networks, they create product videos, etc. While it’s often hard for affiliate marketers to match big brands in all of these aspects, that doesn’t mean that an independent affiliate can’t get close. Pay for a quality press release submission service instead of using some spam-ridden free service. Invest some time in creating videos and uploading them to your own YouTube channel. Create profiles for your affiliate site on Twitter, Facebook, and forums relative to your niche…and then take the time to keep these profiles active. These tasks are time consuming and somewhat costly – but that’s why they work.
7. Focus your SEO efforts on creating great content, and then promote that content one link at a time. Use some creativity to come up with a guide, resource, online tool, etc., that your niche might find really useful. Then, once that piece of content is created, focus on promoting that content by contacting bloggers, other site owners, etc., and asking them to review your content. If the quality is high and the content is useful, it WILL get you links.
8. Site speed matters. Increasing site speed is a great way to boost search engine traffic to an existing site. Most sites can experience dramatic speed improvements by utilizing browser caching, gzip compression, file entity and expires tags, and the Smush.it image compression tool. There are also some inexpensive content delivery network (CDN) options available from Amazon and Rackspace that can dramatically reduce site load time…especially if you rely upon cheap shared hosting for your affiliate site. [Note: If you don't know what these things are, check out Yahoo's best practices for site performance.]
