Many affiliate marketers believe that search engine optimization gives them a license to mint money, which is true to a certain extent. If your affiliate site ranks well on account of certain keywords, you can reap the benefits that such a practice offers to you. And that’s why many affiliates use Black Hat SEO techniques to boost the ranking of their websites. Unfortunately, this is not the recommended way to go for ethical affiliate marketers since it can be counterproductive in the long term.
Here are 6 surefire SEO hacks that can genuinely help you give a boost to your affiliate marketing network:
- Use a keyword-rich domain, but avoid looking spammy: If the domain name of your website is short and it contains an important keyword, this strategy could work well. Some search engines such as Bing attach a lot of importance to this in their ranking criteria. So, adding keywords in the domain name can be beneficial.
- Invest in quality content: Affiliates are notorious for using poor quality content lifted directly from other websites. This is a bad practice and should be stopped immediately if you are doing this. Investing in quality content is worth the effort. It sends a positive signal to search engines, which helps you earn natural links and your content too becomes easier to optimize.
- Keep adding fresh content: Keep adding blog posts to your affiliate site on a daily basis to expand the scope of your website with time. Ensure that search engine crawler returns to your site off and on. This will also help you build a dedicated audience base gradually.
- Avoid using automated link building tools: Using automated link building tools will not help you since search engines — whether it’s Google or Bing – are good at ignoring such cheap links obtained through bulk directory submissions. If you find an automated tool that promises you to give overnight results, just ignore it.
- Follow best practices for on-page optimization
Don’t forget using these on-page optimization practices:- Ensure that the HTML title tag of each page is less than 60 characters in length.
- Use in-content links, which are more powerful than header or footer links.
- Use keywords in every page file name.
- Do add image alt tag if you are using images in your posts.
- Don’t place important content in IFRAMEs, Javascript tags, or as text inside an image.
- Never try to fool search engines by using javascript or CSS tricks to hide text from users.
- Promote your affiliate site: Big brands maintain their active presence on different social media platforms. They issue press releases using premium distribution networks that also helps them earn natural links. Though it’s hard for an affiliate marketer to match big brands, yet they can use a quality press-release submission service instead of going for something untrustworthy.
Summing up
Quick tricks can give you short-term results, but nothing sustainable as such. It is only through a sustained and steady effort that you can win the race. Only the quality of your affiliate site will matter.
