侯延鹏's Blog

Don’t look so shocked! It’s true, affiliate programs can have great search engine optimization benefits.

Now, I know that affiliate programs are often seen as a way to get around needing to do any search engine optimization. I’ll be honest with you: for a long time that’s how I saw them. “If I have an affiliate program,” I thought, “then I don’t have to worry about getting ranked in the search engines. All of my traffic will come from the affiliate referrals!”

There is some truth to that. Having an affiliate program for a product that converts well does ensure a steady flow of traffic even if you’re not well ranked in the search engines. But if you play your cards right, your affiliate program can do double duty: send a steady stream of referrals from the affiliates and get you ranked for some solid keywords in Google.

Let me explain how this is possible.

How Affiliate Links Help Rank Your Product Page

Most affiliate links use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is the technical term for a permanent redirect. Basically, a 301 redirect tells the search engine crawlers to count the affiliate link as a link to the final destination rather than the initial link.

For example, your affiliate link might look like this:

http://theproductdomain.com/?id=12345

But it contains a 301 redirect to the home page:

http://theproductdomain.com/

So when Google sees the affiliate link, it’s not going to try and rank theproductdomain.com/?id=12345, but will apply the link to the ranking of the final destination instead (in this case the home page).

This also applies when affiliates use 301 redirecting scripts to “cloak” their affiliate links. A large portion of affiliates do this. Instead of using the affiliate link above, they will use a redirect that might look like this:

http://affiliatedomain.com/recommends/yourproduct.php

That script will usually use a 301 redirect to their affiliate link, which then 301 redirects to your site’s home page. Google follows both 301s and applies the initial link to the ranking of the final destination (your product sales page). This is also true if the affiliate uses links from cloaking sites like TinyUrl.com or OffTo.net.

To get the maximum benefit from this, you need to make sure that your affiliate program links always redirect to the main product page. For example, a ClickBank affiliate link will result in referrals landing at a page like this:

http://theproductdomain.com/?hop=cbusername

That’s not what you want! You want them to land at theproductdomain.com without showing the “hop=cbusername” portion, because Google counts those as two different pages. So you should make sure that the product page will check the url to see if the “hop=cbusername” is there, and if it is, perform a 301 redirect to theproductdomain.com. This will ensure that you get the maximum benefit from the affiliate links aimed at your product site.

If your site uses PHP, you can use an index.php file that looks something like this:

<?
if(isset($_GET["hop"])){
  header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
  header(“Location: http://theproductdomain.com/”);
  header(“Expires: 0″);
  exit;
}
else{
  readfile(“salesletter.html”);
  exit;
}
?>

Thanks to whitehatcrew.com for the 301 header addition. Can’t believe I forgot that!

What this will do is check for the “hop” variable in the query string. If it finds it, it will redirect to the home page instead. If not, it will show salesletter.html (which should contain your product’s sales letter). That’s an easy way to make sure that ClickBank affiliate links all end up in a 301 redirect to the home page. Don’t worry, the ClickBank cookies will all remain in place so that the affiliate gets credit.

A side benefit is that this will make your affiliates happy. In the past I’ve had many affiliates write in and ask me to remove the “hop=” for my ClickBank products. They don’t like to see it there.

Encourage Proper Keyword Usage In The Affiliate Links

As you may already be aware, having the keywords that you want to rank for in the links aimed at your site is incredibly important to rank well for those keywords. So, for example, if you want your product page to rank for “green widgets”, it’s not going to help you much if all of the affiliate links say “Go to theproductdomain.com now!” or something like that which is completely unrelated to “green widgets.”

To encourage the use of “green widgets” in the link anchor text, be sure and provide the HTML code for your affiliates on the affiliate page. A large portion of your affiliates, especially the ones newer to affiliate marketing, will just copy and paste whatever you give them to use right into their web pages and blogs.

To illustrate this, do a search in Google for “search engine myths exposed” “holy grail”. As of right now that will return 584 results.

The majority of those results are from people who just copied and pasted the example sales copy that I gave my affiliates to promote my new report, Search Engine Myths Exposed. In this particular instance I did not take my own advice and include the HTML code with the keywords that I wanted to rank for in the example copy (it was really meant for emailing, not posting to a web page). However, it clearly demonstrates that a large number of affiliates will copy and paste whatever you give them to use!

Fortunately for me, many of my affiliates are linking to the report site with the keywords “Search Engine Myths Exposed.” This has ensured my #1 position for the phrase in Google.

At first my report did not rank #1 for those keywords. Some of my affiliates were ahead of me, and I was down around #8 in the results. But after I announced the pre-launch and got a swarm of affiliates, my site quickly jumped into first place at Google.

Don’t Limit Yourself To Your Product Name

You certainly don’t want to limit yourself to rank for the name of your product. Research targeted keywords that will help generate sales. For example, my Instant Article Wizard software currently ranks in the top 10 for the keywords article marketing, which brings in steady traffic and sales direct from Google.

In Summary

Yes, your affiliate program will bring in a steady flow of referrals and sales even if you don’t rank well in the search engines, but with a little forethought and extra effort, it can also get you ranked for keywords that will bring generate sales and increase your bottom line!

http://jonathanleger.com/the-seo-benefits-of-an-affiliate-program/