Linkbuilding and SEO
have become pretty demanding now since Google has become much more serious in its efforts to provide the best possible search results for the people who use it. And how can affiliate marketers keep their place in this game and make the most out of it? Here are some pro SEO tips for your affiliate websites that you may want consider incorporating into your strategy.
Content: Show Google that your site is relevant
For some time now Google is putting more weight into the website’s quality, meaning that thin affiliate sites with few product review pages will be much harder to rank for any slightly more competitive term. What you need to do is to show them that your website is relevant for the keywords you’re competing for, and that your goal isn’t just to monetize every pixel of every page. In other words, make your website an authority.
This means creating good content, focusing on a theme for your site and putting out some link worthy non-commercial content that will provide value to the readers.
Here are some ways to help you come up with ideas for content of your website that is both themed around your keyword and useful for the people visiting it:
Übersuggest is a simple tool that scrapes Google Suggest and finds the best keywords out there that Google says are associated with the root or single keyword you give it. It will provide you with a whole list of keywords that you can build your content around, and will also give you an insight in what people are searching for in your niche.
Soovle is a customizable search tool that pulls together suggestions from places like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube… It’s very useful if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, and is a great source of ideas when you’re doing keyword research.
InBoundWriter is a WordPress plugin that you can use in couple handy ways when you’re creating content. You can use it for copy editing – you can put in 3 keywords and the copy you already have, and it will come back with suggestions on how to make the most of it (put the phrase into your subject line, get the phrase higher up into your copy, that sort of things). InBoundWriter will also help you to increase the engagement with your audience by showing you links to the content where there are conversations about that particular keyword right now.
Anchor text alert!
Your competition is probably still using exact match anchor text to rank. A really easy way to outrank them, and to secure your long term position in the search results, is to diversify your anchor text, which is especially easy to do when you do guest blogging. Mix in more of “click here” and “see more”, but also use the partial match – for example, if you’re competing for the term “used car dealers Settle”, go with “used cars”, “car dealers”, “second hand cars”, “cars Seattle”, and diversify it with as many synonyms as you can.
Linkbuilding for the future: be proactive
When you have made your site more of an authority in your niche, it’s a lot easier to look for more valuable link opportunities like guest posting and linkbaits. Why would you want to look for those types of links? Well, most affiliate sites have the same link profiles – directory links, links on link pages, massive blog commenting and other low-quality types, so it’s a good strategy to make your website not look like an affiliate website when it comes to your link profile too.
Some of the things that you may consider doing:
#1 Create pages or blogposts that are most detailed and complete pages found online, to serve as linkbaits – this type of content attracts links naturally, and significantly reduces your linkbuilding efforts. From those pages, link internally to your product review pages to funnel the link juice down on them, which will help them rank.
#2 Identify forums where you can find your targeted audience, and become a leader by helping people out. This doesn’t mean spam forums with links in your profile / signature, but rather constantly provide help to the community. You want to establish yourself as a trustworthy person, so be there to provide answers to any question regarding the product you’re promoting.
#3 Monitor the conversations: set up Google Alerts, so that you can see any conversations related to your niche or a specific blog post you made, and jump right in with the quality information.
We hope this article gave you a few ideas on how to accommodate your affiliate website to the new rules and to keep it up and running for a long time. It does require more work, but it’s very much wort you while, and the faster you adapt, the more benefits you will see from it in the future. Do you think you can implement some of them? Please share your thoughts in the comments bellow.
Jeff Gross writes for the website http://www.npromote.com. He writes on different topics including SEO, blogging, wordpress-hosting, internet and PPC.