Ranking Affiliate Marketing Websites in Search Engines
You might be interested in learning how ranking affiliate marketing websites in search engines can be achieved even if you're on a tight budget or limited in know-how.
While there can be a lot of money to be made in affiliate marketing of real products that are on sale that people want to buy, getting a dedicated site to rank high in the search engines has been something of a roller coaster ride of late.
To be more specific, I'm talking about Google as they still manage more than 60% of all search traffic worldwide.
If you want to rank to make money with your website or blog, you need to rank in Google. But their recent algorithm changes as well as the increase in manual site inspection has made ranking your affiliate site much harder.
In fact, there is plenty of evidence of a great many marketers having a big chunk of their online income wiped out because their once high ranking affiliate sites suddenly took a drop in ranking for a variety of reasons.
I'll take a look at the more obvious ones so you can try and avoid them if possible.
All Ads and Little Real Content
This is a real killer of thin sites as far as ranking goes. Google have figured out how to spot these sites a mile off and are systematically demoting them in their index.
Why?
Because they want a better user experience from search. Sites that do little more than siphon traffic to places like Amazon and other online vendors that run affiliate programs are not good user experiences because they simply send the visitor off somewhere else and get paid if the visitor buys something.
How do you fix this problem?
Make User Friendly Sites
You fix the problem by building out your sites with lots of relevant content you create a better user experience.
I don't mean filling your site up with second rate crap outsourced to a non-native English speaker in the Philippines or somewhere similar where they'll work for a dollar an article. Research and write something interesting, informative and enlightening regarding the niche your site occupies and make it something that you would be proud to let your mother read!
Affiliate Link Density
This is another ranking killer that needs to be addressed. Many affiliate websites tend to write short reviews with two or more affiliate links in the article.
There is usually one attached to the big image of the product. Another in the title or sub title.
And probably another near the end of the article in a call to action "buy now" button or image. There may well be additional affiliate links in the sidebar to related products and what you have is a page that is chock full of affiliate links in ratio to the real content.
Change that ratio and your articles will start ranking again. The current school of thought is to build your reviews out to 400 to 500 words or more if you can, with only one or two affiliate links on the page.
Then intersperse those review articles with real informative articles with NO affiliate links in them. By all means use those articles to link to your review pages to boost the site's on-site SEO. But make sure you have rather more real content pages than review pages and your site will return in the rankings, assuming you have sufficient backlinks.
Backlinks Still Rule
Getting back onto the subject of backlinks, they still make up the lion's share of the way Google rates your site.
However, it's the quality of those links that are counting more nowadays. It's no good spamming a ton of comment links or paying someone to create a thousand or so forum profiles, or blasting crap spun articles all over the web.
Links contained in these are no longer considered of nay real value. They may give your site an initial lift in the rankings, but it will be short lived and could even set you up with a penalty.
Get quality backlinks to your site.
By that I mean broker link exchanges with legit sites and blogs, write guest posts on other people's blogs and all the old fashioned ways of getting links before all this automated spamming crap came along. You might even find that if you write really good articles that people actually get a lot out of for reading, they might even give you a natural link for your trouble.
Get enough of those and your site will soon grow to be an authority in its niche.
Site Authority
The last thing here is about getting yourself a real authority site in your niche. This is where affiliate marketing is heading. Building an authority website is really the best long term strategy.
You don't get that by outsourcing cheap articles because no one wants to read them and other website owners certainly won't offer to link to articles they don't like. But with really good articles that have been properly researched and provide a lot of answers to the visitor's questions, you may just start attracting natural links.
It's not guaranteed, but what is guaranteed is that if you don't write good articles, you won't get any natural links!
Content is Still King Folks!
Things have a tendency to go full circle and the state of play for websites and blogs is no different. For years, the mantra has been "Content is King" if you wanted to get your website or blog to rank well in the search engine results and in particular, Google.
So why did that change and why is it back in fashion again now?
That content is important for the furtherance of your website or blog is not in question, because the more original content a site has, the more authority it will be seen to have by the search engines (assuming that content is not just original, but on topic and useful). Sites with more authority are treated with more respect by Google in particular for the simple reason that they would like to see the most relevant sites at the top of their index to give their visitors the best surfing experience they can.
That filters down the line from search engine to website and the better the website the better the reflection on the ability of the search engine to show the most relevance in its index. That is the general idea, anyway.
Unfortunately, people began to realize there were other ways of tricking the search engines into thinking their websites were more relevant and authoritative than they really were by collecting more inbound links from other sites. This has worked for a few years and still works now, but the noose is tightening and real sites with hundreds of pages of original, relevant content are starting to once again beat out thinner sites with more backlinks.
Sure, you still need links to rank well, especially if your chosen niche is competitive. But now you also need that content to go with them or a visual inspection will reveal a thin site despite all its links and a trip to the sandbox is a probability.
While you're about it, there's no time like the present to learn affiliate marketing from an expert like John Thornhill and you can read all about that in the article I just internally linked to.
Summary
So the message is pretty clear. If you want to rank well and keep ranking well, get lots of backlinks but also publish lots of good, useful and relevant content on your site and you will be fine.
It all comes down to how much work you want to put into your site. If you are willing to work on it and write a lot of top quality content (or pay top dollar and have a professional write it for you), then you will be building a site that you can be proud of and one that the search engines will like.
When Google likes a site, it will rank it and it will be a good long term money earner because it will be reasonably immune to minor algorithm changes in the future. Isn't that worth putting in that extra effort and going that extra mile for?
Posted: December 6, 2020
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