Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites
Search engine optimization (SEO) is basically the practice of optimizing your content for the best results in search engine queries by surfers. All search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, et al.) use a unique algorithm that they’ve developed that takes all of the pages they’ve indexed and tries to apply certain rules to it. So if two sites have a page about “wombat reproduction”, and someone in Thailand types “wombat reproduction” into Google and runs a search, one of those pages is listed in the #1 spot in the results, with the other being listed #2. It’s the ranking algorithms built into each search engine that make that decision.
Working backwards from that point, it stands to reason that if you optimize your content to take into account how search engines rank pages, then your page will more likely land in the #1 spot in search results, which means that it will be clicked more often than the #2 result, which means you’ll make more money as an affiliate. SEO, then, is that process, where you create and optimize your content in certain ways with the hopes of getting ranked higher in search results.
In some ways, SEO for affiliate sites is a very natural process and dovetails perfectly with good writing practices in general. Search engines weigh the title of a page very heavily when ranking results, so picking a clear, focused title for each page of content not only helps you in the world of SEO, it’s something that good writers of Web content naturally do, like breathing. That’s a win-win for you, as you don’t even have to think about it.
The same is true for keeping paragraphs relatively short and sprinkling your keywords throughout the body of the text. Again, it’s only natural that a good writer would do those things, as surfers don’t want to tuck into a solid block of text containing 172,182 words, and the repetition of the subject of the page is a very natual thing to do, for emphasis and clarity.
Which brings us to an important point. Many people like to insinuate that SEO is some black, voodoo magic, deriving from much complicated analysis and number crunching, and beyond the ken of mere mortals. To which I reply, heartily and succintly: “Bullshit.”
Stepping back a bit, as search engines evolve over the years and get smarter and better at what they do (finding and organizing content and hypothetically returning the most useful of what it finds to anyone querying it, in order of usefulness), they’ve done so in fairly common ways. Back in ancient times, search engines heavily weighed meta tags, which are basically invisible titles that people creating Web pages could embed in their pages, to describe in general what the page was about. That’s a decent idea, in theory, because the person creating the page knows best what it’s about, so why not value what they say the page is about.
In practice, though, it didn’t take long for sneaky monkeys to realize that, and start cramming in every word they could think of into the meta tags of every page they built, because it would generate more traffic, and more traffic is always better than less traffic. So search engines were suddenly being manipulated into returning very junky results, until it got too obvious and painful for them and they stopped adding extra value to anything in the meta tags.
This cat and mouse game has always gone on, where creators of Web pages try to manipulate search results in their favor, and always will go on. Search engines constantly tweak their ranking algorithms to combat that, as they have a vested interest in returning on-topic, useful search results. If they do, people use their search engine. If they don’t provide good results, people use the search engine that does provide useful results.
As search engines evolve, they’re more sophisticated, and more and more their efforts are focused on using semantic considerations into their rankings. That is worthy of a whole post of its own, but in a nutshell all that means is that search engines are increasingly aware of what good, focused on-topic writing is, and they can pick it out from all the trash out there. More and more, the SEO you should be doing when writing content is simply practicing good writing skills, such as strong titles, employing commonly-used synonyms ad associated words in your content, linking to other content on your site in natural ways, and so on.
In the past, SEO for affiliate sites typically included much more artifical methods to game the system, such as repeating keywords in both bold and italics, having keywords on each page with H1, H2, and H3 tags in descending order, maintaining a certain keyword density, having all internal and incoming links exactly corresponding to the targeted keyword phrase, etc.
Happily, though, that’s less and less the case, and good news for you. Instead of disappearing down a rabbit hole of endlessly fiddling and manipulating your layout and content, trying to play the SEO game, you can safely ignore a lot of that hoo-ha and mumbo-jumbo, and focus more on writing good, solid content. I’ll post more practical advice on this in the future but I just wanted to get the general gist of this out there, for anyone quietly obsessing over the fact that they’d heard SEO was the best thing since sliced bread but were worried that they knew nothing about it.
Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Sites and related information can be found in Getting Started, SEO