SEO For Affiliate Marketing

Intro

The best strategy to get ahead with affiliate marketing, is ranking through SEO. While there are various methods of making money via affiliate marketing, the most tenable, is by keeping loads of hooks in the water. By this I mean, having multiple ranked pages in Google.

So, how it this achieved? By implementing the guidelines that Google likes, that will keep your articles highly ranked. It’s not only the most sustainable strategy of gaining website traffic, it’s also the cheapest.

So: “What is SEO for Affiliate Marketing”, and how can you excel at it?

I’ll walk you through the following sections and explain why SEO is your best web traffic option.

What is SEO
Have The Right SEO WordPress Plugin
Keywords & Low Hanging Fruit
Internal Linking for Juicing Up
Using Images to Your Advantage
Affiliate Links to be ‘Nofollow’
Make Your Affiliate Links Pretty

First Things First – What is Affiliate Marketing

As you may be searching “SEO for affiliate marketing”, this could be because you’re trying to understand if affiliate marketing is an opportunity, that is something you personally, can achieve. If this is the case, let me advise you that I knew nothing about affiliate marketing or SEO before I started this journey. Many people don’t, yet can carve out a successful online business through this model.

So, affiliate marketing in simple terms, is the promotion of other people’s or merchants products, with the intention of earning a commission if your promotion initiates a sale. You’re effectively the middle man (or woman) in a sale, which gives you a financial outcome. 

Beginners Step By Step Guide to Affiliate Marketing

These products could be physical or digital. For instance, you could promote Amazon products, which basically covers every niche possible. On the other hand, you may prefer to promote online courses, which can also be quite lucrative.

To promote these products, you’ll want to use SEO as your primary traffic strategy, as outlined in the introduction. So, let’s now look at what SEO is, and how it works in your favour.

Secondly – What is SEO

The term SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is how search engines determine where your articles are ranked. In the affiliate marketing world, these articles are your product promotions.

Google and other search engines have a number of factors that, when combined, total an SEO score for your post articles. With the correct implementation of these SEO factors, the higher ranking you’ll gain, when people type in search terms Google.

I’m going to show you some of the main criteria that these search engines look for, and how affiliate marketing can be affected within some of these specifics.

Implementing Your SEO Strategy

To implement SEO into your affiliate marketing campaigns, here’s what Google will be keeping an eye out for.

Have The Right SEO WordPress Plugin

Every website (especially when first starting out) should have an SEO plugin installed. This will not only help you with your website sitemap, but also social media aspects, Google Analytics and other SEO data.

There are several decent SEO plugins for WordPress, my personal favourite is called All-in-One-SEO. Other popular SEO plugins are Yoast SEO, and The SEO Framework. All of these do a good job, but I’ve found my personal favourite to be more lightweight, which allows for quicker website loading. I also have less conflicting issues with my WordPress theme.

Keywords & Low Hanging Fruit

Keywords are integral to any post SEO performance. Unless you’re just “winging it”, all articles on the internet have been through an SEO checklist. This may be a more thorough checklist depending on the size of the organisation and experience of the SEO strategist. It could just be a personal audit for your own blog.

Keyword research is basically the first part of this process. Once you’ve decided on what it is your selling through your affiliate marketing campaign or promotion, you need to understand what people are searching in Google, to find these products.

So, let’s say you have a cooking blog and are advertising slow cookers. You could use the keyword “best slow cookers”, which would have been fine before 2010. Now however, there is too much competition for that keyword, so you need to try alternatives.

That’s where the “low hanging fruit” comes in. These are longer search terms that are more targeted to a micro niche. You’d be better off using a search term similar to “best slow cookers for roast chickens”. This way you’ll be targeting those people searching for a slow cooker for a particular circumstance.

There won’t be as much search volume for this keyword, but you’ll still get traffic for this term because you’re a much better chance of ranking on page 1 in search engines. You will also rank for “slow cookers”, but a number of pages down the rankings.

So, keywords as you can see is an extremely important factor in your affiliate marketing SEO technique. You can then write your content around this keyword, with confidence that this article will do well.

Internal Linking for Juicing Up

Have you ever noticed when you visit most websites, there are text links that are directed to other internal articles? That’s because Google use internal linking as a ranking factor. The more internal links you include in your posts, the better performance you should see from your efforts.

External links are also important, but make sure they link to authoritative websites such as Wikipedia, BBC or YouTube. Many years ago, you could have just linked externally to your best friends website, but Google have since cracked down on this, and only highly ranked websites will now fit the bill.

If you’re new to blogging and affiliate marketing, you won’t have many internal articles to link to. This is fine, it takes time to rank anyway. My advice is to keep a log of all the articles you’ve written. This way you can go back and add internal links after you’ve written a decent amount of content.

Here’s How to Link to a Website

Using Images to Your Advantage

Images can also play a part in your SEO, in several ways. Firstly, they break up your content, which makes your articles easier to digest. This helps because it keeps visitors on your website longer, and the length of time people stay on your website is also a ranking factor.

Your keyword can also be attached to your image. You can place it in the “alt tag” field of the image. The values in this field will be displayed if the image cannot be loaded for some reason. I’m sure you’ve seen it, when you see an image that looks like this:

This “alt tag” will also be read out to blind people who use the voice technology. So including your keyword within a readable sentence is what Google is looking for. When you add this “alt tag”, read it back to yourself to make sure it makes sense.

Affiliate Links to be ‘Nofollow’

Nobody can stooge Google, so do what they recommend. Adding a small piece of code called a “nofollow”, will stop the link being followed by Google. Even Matt Cutts (formally of Google), suggests adding “nofollow” to affiliate links. This is more of a safety mechanism so that Google doesn’t think you’re spamming with loads of affiliate links throughout your articles.

To add a “nofollow”, simply add the following to the end of your affiliate link code:

rel=”nofollow”

This is similar to the “noindex” attribute, which blocks search engines from indexing your pages or posts.

Make Your Affiliate Links Pretty

Whilst you can add “nofollow” to your links, this also makes your affiliate links longer than is preferred. These affiliate links can look ugly and unprofessional. So, what to do, to counter that?

You may be thinking that visitors don’t see the full link, just the text that includes the link. But, when you hover your mouse over this text link, the full link will appear in the bottom left hand of your screen. Some people notice this and refuse to click if it doesn’t look trustworthy.

So, here’s what we do. We make the affiliate links pretty! There’s a WordPress plugin called “PrettyLinks”, which will cloak your ugly links and allow you to custom name your link. These cleaner looking links are not only easier on the eye, but they also create more trust. You can read more about link cloaking here..

There’s also an option to have these Pretty links with a “no follow” tag, so make sure to do this for affiliate links.

Wrapping Up

Many affiliate marketers use paid advertising, but most still use SEO to gain free traffic. It’s more sustainable, and unlike on March 14, 2019 (the day I’m writing this article, not publishing), there are no problems when Facebook & Instagram goes down, affecting everyone that only uses pad ads.

Make sure you do your keyword research, and use this keyword in all the correct positions of your articles. Internal links are your best friend when it comes to SEO, and external links are also necessary. Be sure to use these actively.

Download the Pretty Link plugin and start using it to cloak those unsightly links that can have a negative effect. Implement these strategies and you’ll be on your way to creating a great affiliate marketing career.