Traditional Affiliate Networks and Google

Traditional affiliate marketing stipulates that links point to an affiliate network’s website.  After a series of redirects, the user will end up on an retailer or merchant’s website.  The redirects at the affiliate network are typically “http/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” redirects.  Google will follow these redirects, and end up on the retailer’s website.  In this way, you are contributing to the link juice of that retailer.

Automatic Affiliate Marketing and Google

With an automatic affiliate marketing tool like ProfitBite, the links to retailer’s are created directly to the retailer.  ProfitBite intercepts clicks on these links with JavaScript and automatically converts them to affiliated tracked links.  Google doesn’t follow JavaScript links.  Since the ultimate target for the links is the retailer’s website, links redirected through ProfitBite will contribute to the link juice of the retailer in the same way as standard affiliate links.

ProfitBite can also be configured to insert links into a website using JavaScript where the retailer’s brand name is mentioned.  Since the links never exist in a static context, Google will not index these links.  These links will therefore not affect a website’s Google ranking.

If users specifically request it, ProfitBite will function with links that use the “rel=nofollow” attribute to stop Google following links.

Will Google Penalize me for Affiliate Linking?

The body of evidence at the moment points to Google not detrimentally penalizing websites for creating affiliated links to retailers.  However, link spamming will reduce your Google ranking.

The best practice is to always to link to relevant content.  If links originate from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources then there will be no detrimental effect to your Google ranking.

Further useful information on Google can be found at:

• http://www.searchjohnston.co.uk/2008/10/affiliate-links-paid-links-google/
• http://hugi.to/blog/archive/2003/10/02/googlebot-and-site-redirects

It’s a simple fact: affiliate sites require traffic.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but the one that comes above all else is natural search engine optimisation (SEO). There are plenty of strategies and tactics that you can employ to push your traffic up and this article contains some tips and tricks which you might find useful.

Starting with the basics – why is SEO important? Quite simply, your site will gain more exposure if it has a higher position in the search result listings for your target key phrases. When you use a search engine to find out information, how often do you browse past the first page? If your site isn’t listed there, chances are it won’t be found by the vast majority of potential users.

You have to consider just how key SEO is to your web marketing strategy. If you are considering placing all your eggs in one basket and looking for big results then obviously you will need to think about your how site is structured and how content is written and presented. Building your site in standards-compliant code is crucial, as is populating it with original, unique content. Google (and the other major search engines) doesn’t like cookie-cutter sites made up of the same content as every other affiliate site. If you are serious about being highly ranked, you should be thinking of ways to generate unique content that your competitors simply don’t have, and filling your site with it. This is the first major step towards achieving that page one listing.

Original, interesting content isn’t just good for the search engine spiders – it will also attract human attention, generating those all-important inbound links and further viral traffic through word-of-mouth recommendations.

Careful thought should be given to the keyword phrases that you choose to optimise the site for. Consider the terms that your users might enter into a search engine to find the products/services that your site contains information on. It’s better to target 3-4 word phrases than those consisting of only one or two words. Working in this way is known as targeting the “long tail” – those terms where search volumes are low, but competition is also low. The long tail is where the money lies.

So what is a long term keyword? Take the term “marketing”, or even “affiliate marketing”, which is extremely broad and would be very difficult to achieve a page one raking for. If you were to add on a couple more words to make it “affiliate marketing services” however, the level of competition might decrease. If you were to further specialise to “affiliate marketing services teacher”, page one is looking much more realistic. The number of people searching for this phrase will be a lot lower, but if you build pages and structure your site to cater for a multitude of similar long tail phrases, your traffic volumes will increase accordingly. These keywords need to be littered all over your website to increase its visibility.

Another idea is to create a supporting blog and fill it with original content, linked to your website. If you create the blog on a sub-domain e.g. blog.mydomain.com, you will squeeze more ‘SEO juice’ on the inbound link front; if you put the blog in a subfolder e.g. mydomain.com/blog, then you will benefit from a better internal linking structure. Whilst having different web pages for your website is fine, a sub domain paves way for a new category, topic or blog. So how does this benefit you? Well firstly they are usually free to add to your hosting account and easy to create, and secondly bring lots of added value to your website as the sub-domain is viewed as an entirely unique domain, meaning it will usually appear as a separate site in the search results.

Link building is one of the major aspects of SEO. You can build your inbound link base naturally by writing interesting articles that will attract the audience’s attention due to their content, which will then be likely to be linked to by other people. You could try writing something outrageous or eye-catching, a technique commonly known as ‘”link baiting” which has become a powerful way of generating natural link building but may not be suitable for corporates.

Some other ideas for generating inbound links include writing a topical article, talking about something newsworthy, being controversial or humorous, engaging in a debate. You basically need to use your imagination and make it interesting to as wide an audience as possible. For example if you specialise in Halloween products, write an article about safe trick or treating, or the top 10 costume ideas.

Another tip is to try guest blogging on a site that relates to your field. If your website blog has barely any visitors it makes sense to build a profile on one that does. Some blog owners will allow you write a small biography about yourself and include it at the end of your guest article with a link to your website. You should know your industry well enough that you know the best blogs to contact. Try using Google blogs to find ones that are suited to you. For a general blog, Blogcatlog.com offers a range of topics and lets you submit as many articles as you like.

This might seem obvious but analysing your competitors is a great way to get ideas. Look at the websites which are ranked number 1 for your target keywords and try to work out what it is that they did to get there. Look at their inbound links by entering “link:competitordomain.com” into Google. Have a look at the websites linking to them and decide whether or not you could request/win a link from the same sites. There are lots of handy tool available that you can add to your browser. In particular, there are some very strong addons for FireFox from seobook.com. Downloading the tools is free and gives you access to a range of facilities for gauging search engine performance and comparing competing websites.

Directory submissions are commonly used by webmasters to try and increase traffic to their site by building their inbound link base. However, this method has good and bad points to consider. Links from directory sites are generally very low value so they won’t really give your site much of a leg-up. They are very good at hiding your high value links from competitors though. Do not buy links as it could be disastrous – Google has been known to de-list sites faster than you can say “page rank” on discovery that link buying has been used.

Consider article submissions as a way to build up a profile for your site. They work in a similar way to guest blogging. Some websites enable users to post their own useful, interesting articles and if considered newsworthy, you may even get paid a small fee! Once the article is live, there will be a link for readers to find out more about you/your website. One website to look at in particular is Nettuts.com. They pay up to $150 for one article and are constantly updating the topics that they require from readers. Of course, the article will be reviewed to check its relevancy and content, but if you find a website tailored to your interests then it’s a good idea to look into.

Another good way to optimise your search engine results is to enlist the help of a PR company. They will be able to submit an article about your company or about a development in your industry on your behalf, and might even be able to write the article for you. You can submit to some online PR companies for free, whilst others charge. The more companies you submit to, the more likely it will appear on a search engine linked under the press release site.

Finally, it is important to remember that the best inbound links are the ones that take a lot of work or that your competitors can’t get. If it’s easy, it’s worth nothing. It may be more time-consuming, but will give you better results in the end – after all the ultimate aim is to drive traffic to your site.

Corporates can be very particular about who links to their sites, and in what context, with guidelines on precisely how they want in-bound links to be formatted.

Search engines place great value on the links within a website (the actual text within the link, the address of the target page, the HTML markup used to outline it), but also on the links to a website. Links from more ‘important’ sources are worth more than those from the lesser sites, but a link from even the smallest of sites is a form of marketing for the target site.

There is an entire market place for people to bid for the position of their links at the top of the search engine listings.

Clearly, links are a big deal.

With this in mind, what is the value of a link?

A literal value could be calculated by taking the average value per unit of traffic to a particular site. The various sources which provide the traffic and their resultant revenue would need to be considered in isolation as the value might be higher or lower depending on the specific context and content of the link.

In CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) affiliate marketing, merchants only pay commissions for traffic which actually generates sales and the amounts paid are based on figures negotiated and experimented with in the past few years. Typical commission rates range from less than 1% to over 20% depending on the merchant.

As a publisher using affiliate marketing to generate revenue for your site, the value of your out-bound links is going to be a function of the likelihood of the user converting into a sale and the number of click throughs your link gets.

To maximise your chances of generating revenue from the links you create, use the following tips:

1. Make your link part of a call to action – rather than saying “click here” or “more info”, try using positive, descriptive text such as “the best book I ever read” or “my favourite clothes shop”.
2. Place your links within original, interesting and keyword rich content. Optimising copy for the search engines is an article in itself, but the more effort you put into making your content both search engine friendly and interesting for human readers, the more traffic you’ll generate for your site and the more click-throughs your links will receive.
3. Be genuine – try to avoid placing links in your content for the sake of it and make sure that the readers will see value being added by what you write. This will make them more likely to trust you when you suggest a good deal that you’ve seen.
4. Quality over quantity. Although you have to be ‘in it to win it’, simply filling a site up with lots of out-bound links is no way to make a success of your affiliate marketing activities. Make sure you are diluting the number of out-bound links down with editorial content.
5. If marketing via social media such as Twitter, don’t post a link with every single update. Try to maintain a ratio of 1 affiliated tweet for every 5 general updates – noone is interested in following a user who simply spams them with link after link!
6. Take your time – you can’t build a high-value, affiliate marketing supported site overnight – be patient and experiment with your linking strategy. Make sure you have a suitable web analytics package installed so that you can monitor your visitor trends and use heat maps to highlight where the hotspots are in your content. Continual improvement is the way to ensure that your site provides you with the best possible return.

To conclude, the value of a link is the value you give it. Follow the above steps to have the best chance of maximising your potential revenue whenever you add affiliated links to your website and you’ll be making commissions in no time.