Can Affiliate Program Help Your Search Engine Optimization Strategy?
By Igor Mordkovich on Jun 22, 2006 in Link Building, Affiliate Marketing, General, SEO
Many companies started their affiliate programs mainly for the reason to get relevant clean links to help in their SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. Did it work for them? For some I am sure it did, but when you try to catch two rabbits at the same time, you might just loose both of them.
Here is what I mean.
Affiliates are there to make money … not help your SEO strategy. Another big problem is that many of them are sceptic when you ask them to put a clean link (link without a tracking code that tracks their sales) on their site. They really have to trust you here or you might just get lucky and find a dumb one.
Anyway, good affiliates will not be interested in helping you with SEO and thus won’t use clean links. You probably know those couple of companies that offer new technology (using special code that tracks from the merchant’s site and thus keeps the affiliate link look natural) that will actually help your SEO ? Well, just go and ask affiliates if they feel comfortable using it. Right now the answer will be NO!
So what can you do with your affiliates to get some benefit for your SEO ranking?
The answer is simple. You build a relationship with that affiliate and then either ask for a clean link somewhere not too visible on their site OR you pay for it.
But if the affiliate helps YOU with your SEO, isn’t that counterproductive for them? I mean, if you rank better than them then that’s commissions lost.
St0n3y | Jun 22, 2006 | Reply
Stoney, that applies to a situation where affiliate is optimizing their site to rank for the same keywords.
I found many affiliates who only utilize PPC, mailing list using newsletters, etc. It’s actually interesting. They have a site that has a decent page rank and yet they do not target exact keywords you target or they just don’t care about SEO. The theme is relevant but there is no specific keyword targeting being utilized.
You bring up a good point and it applies to many situations where you are competing with your affiliates, but there are many other situations where the affiliate is not concerned about SEO.
Igor M. | Jun 22, 2006 | Reply