Affiliate SEO: On-Page & Off-Page. Improve Your Search Position
Affiliate SEO
Content marketing affiliates are dependent upon SEO for their traffic. Sure you can create great information, that solves a problem for your niche audience but …
Your content has a competitive disadvantage without optimized on-page SEO and quality off-page backlinks.
Affiliate SEO: On-Page
What is on-page affiliate SEO and why is it important in affiliate marketing? Think of it as your content and all of the additional html and information that helps search engines find it. It’s what makes it relevant to the user who made the search query. Affiliates are particularly dependent upon organic search to drive visitors to their sites. In most cases, paid search is not cost effective so SEO drives the organic search results to create your audience.
Affiliate SEO: Off-Page
Well, then there must be off-page SEO? Yes. Off-page SEO is all of the external references to your posts. These are your backlinks.
It is the key to your domains authority.
You want to reach out to other sites via guest posting, forum posting, videos and infographics – even social media, PBNs and other links you have editorial control over.. We will cover these SEO strategies in an upcoming article.
Let’s dive in.
Keyword Research
Keywords are still the lifeblood of an affiliate marketing traffic strategy. Some keywords will just be too difficult for a new site to rank for. They are dominated by large companies with a long history and large marketing budgets. Others are just too obscure to matter. Yes, I can rank number one for “cheapest pink rooster sunglasses”, but no one searches for it. So no traffic from it.
Google is now well beyond just keyword lookup in your documents. They are using semantic processing and complex data mining techniques to understand your information better. Just covering your post with the target keywords is a bad idea and can even have negative effects.
— Density
Overuse, or keyword stuffing, will have a negative impact on your articles ranking. Even though they are becoming less important, you still want to strategically use them. Put your primary specific long tail keyword you want to rank for in your Title, H1, one image alt tag, and early in the first paragraph. A few more references are fine, it needs to feel natural. As a quality writer if you were using the same adjective multiple times you would look for a synonym.
— Semantic Keywords
Semantic keywords are the words that give relevance to your post. Imagine you are writing about breadcrumb navigation for a website. If a search engine simple found the articles that had great information about breadcrumbs you would see posts about at least 3 topics; web design, cooking, and Hansel and Gretel.
For the breadcrumbs search, it is the surrounding keywords of “navigation”, “BootStrap” and “SEO “etc. that will give you placement for breadcrumb navigation. Many of these related keywords will flow naturally from your writing. There are a few products you can use to check that you have covered the most popular semantic keywords.
First, you can use Google auto-suggest as illustrated in the image. When you start typing you will be given suggestions. Another option is LSI Graph, a popular free tool. We have a quick tip on using LSI Graph to find article topics.
Other popular free semantic keyword products include Moz KeyWord Explorer, Soovel, and Ubbersuggest. Soovle is a tool that uses auto-complete suggestions for a number of search engines including Bing, and Amazon. Ubbersugest works similarly to Soovel but uses the Google autocomplete data exclusively. Both are free tools.