- Don’t load pages with irrelevant words
- Provide unique and relevant content
This is what Google has to say about affiliate sites. The first one is a general issue, applicable for all websites, whereas, the second one relates to affiliate site more specifically. Can you recall Matt Cutts “Indexing Timeline“, lots of roars were sprouted as comments to that post in web’s probably the most popular webmasters’ blog? After an apparently harsh measure taken by Google to block ’spammy’ sites flooded with junks of affiliate links? So, affiliate sites call for SEO, which must be different from a non-affiliate website.
Now the biggest issue is what to do and how to do that?
Just read the Google guidelines there, first one does not let you add irrelevant words, which is applicable for all the websites. But the second, specifically for the affiliate sites, looks very interesting. You have to add value to your sites - ‘Unique and Relevant Content’ - is the necessary and sufficient criteria for ranking higher in the Google SERP.
So, affiliates must not fall short of ideas. If you are an expert in a subject, and you have the ability to write a lot of articles on that subject, then the problem is much simple for you. All you need is to register a domain name, preferably reflecting the focus of the site, purchase an affordable hosting plan, and either use a content management system or develop and design a simple HTML based website with the affiliate links piping in between the contents. Depending upon your level of expertise and the power of self-expression, both the visitors and that Bot will respond to your site. A good response will definitely going to give you rewarding returns in terms of hits, return visits and conversion.
But, and the biggest ‘but’ is the fact that most of us do not have a Ph.D. degree in a specific subject and still we need money. So, you have to work on for more option. A comparison shop is definitely a good option. Again it calls for some research work. My recent studies indicate that ‘Inkjet Printer Cartridges’ is one of the hottest selling stuff in the Internet. So, you may take part in ‘Inkjet Printer Cartridges’ affiliate programs, and open a comparison shop listing five to ten sellers against each item.
Yeh Man are you joking?
Yes, if you are well aware of the varieties of Inkjet Printer Cartridges available now, you will simply end up in frustration as it may take few months to develop your shop ( Unless you are able to develop sophisticated scripts to automate the task using Datafeeds ) and when your shop is online, prices might have changed meanwhile - making your site absolutely useless for the visitors.
So, what to do?
Simply narrow down your option, may be a brand specific site, i.e., focussed on a brand - like Canon or HP, will be better; like “Canon Inkjet Printer Cartridges”, or “HP Inkjet Printer Cartridges” and even if you think that you can’t manage the work load involved, you can make the scope still narrower. But whatever you would like to sell in a Comparison shop, setup your objective first depending upon available resources. For obvious reason, ‘Inkjet Printer Cartridges’ is just an example, you may go with many different selling products using ‘EBay Top 10′ list, or something like that.
It would be better for me not to disclose any other secrets for promotion of Affiliate websites, but I can’t help it. Today I’m in a fine mood to discuss these secret issues, so, read on.
There are few things you must try to follow while building an affiliate site:
1. Your Page Title should contain Keywords, but, try to avoid the titles given in Datafeed or the same title as used by your merchants. My studies with certain brand of products have clearly indicated the dangers of using the same title tags. Against each merchant, there may be lots of affiliate sites just like yours, won’t it look spammy, if Google Search Result #1 to #100 get occupied with different URLs having the same title? What do you think? If you were ‘Google’ - what would you do?
2. Try to avoid the same description, both in META and CONTENT, as provided by your merchant.
3. Use ‘H1′ tag intelligently to cover keywords without repeating the page title.
4. Few free links in your web page may be a good protection against Google-Bite.
5. Add value to your affiliate site, after adding each page, ask yourself the question - ‘Does it add any value?’, or ‘Is There any other site providing the same information in a better way?’ Satisfy your-self first with the quality of your web pages, then think of the visitors; “G”-Bot is intelligent enough to pick up and promote the best in the web, so you need not be too much worried about the Bot at the very beginning.
And in fine, no, I won’t tell a single more word. Now it is up to you to decide whether you will enjoy the Google Juice or Not.
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