Affiliate SEO: On-Page & Off-Page. Improve Your Search Position

Google is now much smarter about “good content” than they have been in the past. Spinning, duplicate text, and very low-quality article mills will not cut it. It is a tricky challenge though because writing is expensive.

If you are a strong writer, do the affiliate linked, money posts yourself. This will make you more in-tune with your readers. If you can’t or choose to outsource writing, there are many resources. We compiled a list of outsourced writing resources you may find useful. Lower cost sources can be used for the 1000-word review and informational posts.

This combination of self-authoring, premium authors for money posts and budget authors for informational posts work well for me. You need to create a good-sized body of work to get more backlinks and ranking. Outsourcing some of the writing will also help with the velocity factor. But there are other considerations as well.

— Uniqueness

It should go without saying that you use someone else’s copy and expect it to rank. There was a time when an Amazon storefront with just product descriptions and images pulled from Amazon could rank. No longer. If you outsource your writing be sure to check for plagiarism. Free sites like Copyscape will provide this service. If you have multiple sites or have a need to use the same text in two locations you must use the canonical tag to identify the one you want to be considered the original.

— Quality

Quality matters now. So does volume. You need to have a body of work to start driving traffic. A home page and five reviews will get indexed but search engines will not view you as the authority in any niche with that little information. Depending on your niche, work as aggressively as you can towards 25 posts. In the past low-quality posts could rank. Even spinning had some use. Now spun articles are a bad idea and the lowest quality writing farms should be avoided. Expect to pay $50 for a 1000 word post from a quality lower cost worker. The higher-quality writers with SEO experience will be at least 50% higher.

For starter sites, you can often negotiate packages of articles. None of these options is going to get you a top-tier writer or editor. The strongest writers will be $.10 -$.20 a word or $100 -$200 for a 1000 word article and $400 for a long home-page feature. As talented as they are, they are overkill for most niche sites.

Another ranking factor is your linking.

According to Analytics, your “bounce-rate” is defined as;

” A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”

But this is a bit tricky for affiliates. After all, your “job” is to get the visitor to Amazon. So a high-bounce rate is not necessarily bad for business. The trick is to understand if people are leaving your site because they think it is an affiliate fluff site or because they are heading off to Amazon to get pricing and reviews.

Bounce rate is not clearly a ranking factor but it certainly is a conversion rate factor. You need to engage the audience and lead them to your CTA links.

— Walls of Text

Your bounce rate is greatly affected by the presentation of the information. If you have multiple paragraphs without any images or other visual components readers will leave quickly.  These walls of text are a sure way to lose visitors. You can break the text up with; images, block quotes, tables, videos, etc. Visitors are consuming information by a quick skim of your page.

If you pull them in with video and illustrations your bounce rate will be lower and your SERP rank higher.

Your site’s architecture has a direct influence on the visitors’ experience. There are a number of ranking factors related to this area. Sites need to be organized in a way that users can easily navigate around it. It is often based to have compartments of information on specific topics. A silo structure often works best for this.

In addition to your site’s structure, there are other factors to consider. Page load speed is an important measurement. The difference between 1.5 seconds and 5 seconds will be many many users bouncing away. All sites should be secure and be using SSL at this point. Sites should be designed for mobile visitors.

— Site Performance

Images and other visual items can have an impact on site performance. Always reduce image sizes. Use lazyload plugins for videos. When you embed a YouTube video you are also embedding a bunch of javascript. This loads for each image on the page. Use caching and a CDN. There are many factors that will impact site performance. We did an in-depth case study of how to speed up an affiliate site.

— Mobile Experience

We are now in a mobile-first world. You must design for mobile users. With themes like Divi and Thrive, this is very straightforward. I create posts on a desktop, then reduce the screen size for a quick check of the tablet and phone settings. As the page window is made smaller the page dynamically adapts After the post is complete I double-check with actual phone and/or tablet.

Best practice is to not link to “cousins”. You want to maintain the topical purity of each silo. You can link to siblings, other articles in the same silo, to your parent or to uncles.  Silos can be set up as either pages with a parent:child relationships or posts with categories to group the silo articles. Each child should be linked to their parent.

— SSL

You must have a green padlock on your site. This is a ranking factor and Google has stated they will penalize rankings in the future from non-https sites. Fortunately, SSL is very easy to set up these days. Most hosts provide free SSL certificates or you can use one from a CDN vendor like CloudFlare. These are not certificates assigned to just your site. If you are running an e-commerce store you should have your own certificate. Privacy and security create trust

The easiest way to implement SSL is to use Really Simple SSL plugin (free). This will force all HTTP requests to be https. If you find you are not getting the green padlock, there is a good chance you have mixed content perhaps a link to an HTTP: resource in a style sheet or template. You can diagnose these issues with sites like WhyNoPadlock. If you are migrating from HTTP to https: you need to be careful to not lose your HTTP rank. Be sure to add both the HTTP and https sites in your webmaster account.