Becoming a Double Threat: Integrating Your SEO and Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

Reading Rand’s post on the session with search engineers from the big 3 at SMX East spurred me on to write this post I’ve been meaning to commit to paper for a while. Point 2 of Rand’s 6 ‘takeaways’ referred to affiliate programs and the PR value passed by do-follow affiliate links. 

This is a method I’ve been using for a while (I’m sure some posts have been written before about this stuff but I haven’t seen any lately), and I’ve always been a bit surprised that

a) the engines haven’t stomped it out, and

b) so few companies appear to be getting it right

I thought I’d go over some of the golden rules of exploiting the full potential of affiliate links and turning your affiliate campaign into a double threat by making it work on a referral and SEO level.

1. Cut out the middle man, keep your affiliate links clean

For your affiliate links to pass link juice from your affiliates to your site, what you need is a clean link from the affiliate to you. If you’re an affiliate with a broker like tradedoubler or affiliatefuture, chances are your links gotta pass through their internal tracking before landing visitors on your site. If you’re lucky this will be done with a 301 so the search engines should in theory follow the link, but a lot can happen between the link and your landing page when you go through a middle man…

• They might be using a 302 or meta refresh (not ideal)
• They might block the bounce page in their robots file
• I’ve seen some programs which bounce the visitors 2 or more times before landing them on your site

Any of these things can damage the chances of link juice passing from your affiliates to you, so what can you do about that?

In my opinion, the best solution is to run your own affiliate scheme; that way, you control the links (and you might save a few bucks in the process). There’s plenty of off the shelf software which you can install on your site or subdomain, which will give you most of the same professional affiliate management features so your affiliates can login and manage their links, payments and so forth.

The big disadvantage, of course, is you’re not plugged into a network of affiliates, which means generating interest in your program is harder. But as I’ll explain later, the good affiliates will find you (with a little help!).

2. The anatomy of a clean affiliate link

To guarantee the passing of precious link juice and reduce the possibility of links being devalued for being from affiliates, there’s a clear winner for me when it comes to setting up your links. Let your affiliates link to you directly, without any tracking codes or bounce pages, and use their referrer information to credit the link to your affiliate.

There are 2 big advantages to this sort of tracking. First and foremost, the link is clean for the search engines. Secondly, smart affiliates will use this type of link to promote your site from within editorial content because the links are masked from any affiliate tracking. Even a savvy reader won’t spot the difference between genuine attribution of a natural link and cynical commercial, affiliate links. This makes your affiliate program more attractive and lucrative to your affiliates, which is good news for you–you’re starting to become a double threat!

There are other ways to get SEO-friendly links out of affiliates, but this is by far the cleanest. Check out botw.org’s affiliate program (or their SiteExplorer backlinks) for a great example of how to get your links right.

3. Optimise every link like it was your last

One of the systemic problems I often see with affiliate programs comes from the fact that the affiliate guys don’t talk to the SEO guys, or worse, the affiliate guy isn’t an affiliate guy at all but a sales and marketing guy or the work experience kid who makes banners in photoshop.

If you’re serious about optimising your affiliate campaign for maximum SEO impact, you need to think about what keywords you want to be targeting in your affiliate links, so someone should be screaming questions like:

• What keywords need the most work on the SEO side
• Which of those keywords convert best in paid search campaigns
• Which anchor text goes to which landing page (we’ll come onto these later)

Some affiliates (again, probably the more experienced ones) won’t use your recommended link text but many will just cut and paste the html you provide them, so double check you’ve got your keywords in the anchor text and you’re making use of the link title attribute- every little helps.

Don’t stop with your text links, either. Buttons, banners and even flash can actually be even more lucrative for links because most affiliates will copy and paste the code you give them straight onto their site, often in juicy places like the top banner slot of their homepage. When you formulate your embed code, make sure you include a