SEO Tips for Affiliate Marketing Websites

So you have a website and want to earn extra revenue with an affiliate network. Well, search engine optimisation (SEO) will be a key element of any successful strategy and it’s not as complicated as you might think.

These SEO tips for affiliate marketing websites will set you heading in the right direction and will complement your choice of affiliate network that has revenue earning opportunities for your website, in your newsletter, on social media pages or within your blog.

Understanding SEO for Affiliate Marketing Websites

The SEO process for a website that uses an affiliate network to generate revenue is no different to the SEO processes used on any other website.

When the search engines find the same keywords used several times on your website and within well thought out content, your website will begin to rank in the search engine results.

Choose Relevant Keywords

The first step in the SEO process is to choose relevant keywords that are specific to your website’s niche or business.

Certain keywords or phrases may be highly competitive and receive a huge number of searches each month while others receive fewer searches and are less competitive, giving you the opportunity to rank highly with ease. A SEO strategy targeting both highly competitive and less competitive keywords can often be the route to success.

You can determine the popularity of your keywords and discover new keyword phrases that may drive traffic to your website by using the Google Keyword Planner tool.

Create and Publish Original Content

Your SEO strategy should include the time to publish and develop great content that is related to your chosen keywords. This original content should be published on your website, include your keywords used two or three times and have a word count of at least 500 words.

The topic of your content should be relevant to both your websites theme and the chosen program from your affiliate network, so if your website is about cricket you will want to choose an affiliate scheme that might sell cricket bats or sports equipment.

The most important tip when writing content for your website is to ask yourself does this help the reader? and is the content engaging?

A great way to create content for your website is to write reviews about products that are featured on your affiliate network schemes as these are highly searched for by consumers looking to buy that product.

Create Back Links

You can drive traffic to your website and increase its reputation with the search engines by creating quality back links for websites that have a similar theme to your niche or business. These back links could be included within a guest blog post where you share your expertise on a particular topic.

You can find out more about SEO copywriting here by reading the eBooks which cover the topics of content marketing, SEO copywriting, internet marketing and email marketing.

Adhere to Search Engine Webmaster Guidelines

It is essential to adhere to search engine webmaster guidelines as using improper SEO strategies could actually damage the reputation and ranking of your site.

Webmaster guidelines cover a variety of subjects including how to submit your site to a search engine, design and content guidelines, technical guidelines and quality guidelines which discuss negative and manipulative behavior that may damage a sites reputation and ranking.

Under the context of SEO for affiliate marketing websites it’s important to note that participating in affiliate programs without creating sufficient value is seen as a negative trait highlighting once again the need to create great original content for your website.

Each search engine, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, has its own guidelines and you can find out more about Google’s webmaster guidelines here.