Many courses on affiliate marketing that I know do not attempt to teach the full details of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the students would complete the courses without knowing exactly how to do SEO.

I have my bias but I personally feel that any course on affiliate marketing or internet marketing should cover SEO to the extent that the students know exactly what to do to rank their niche keywords after completing the course.

Affiliate marketing is about having traffic (and for this discussion, we are talking about website traffic) and the subject matter authority and influence so that your audience looks up to you for recommendations of solutions, services and products. As they buy the affiliate products, you get the affiliate commissions.

As you know, there are two main ways to get traffic from people who are new to your website. One is through paid ads (Google Adwords and Facebook Ads) and the other is through organic search traffic from SEO.

I feel that paid ads should always be balanced with organic traffic. Paid ads serve the purpose of driving traffic to your website with the budget you are setting aside for campaigns with specific goals, be it brand building, a boost to your business etc. And this is all okay. There are times when your ROI can be met, there may be times when ROI is missed for various reasons but that’s part and parcel of campaigns.

I have a problem however if paid traffic is the only source of traffic affiliate marketers rely on. The reason being you are not optimizing your web presence. You have contents on your website and over time you want to be an authority figure in your niche area.

With the content, it is a pity and shame if you are not leveraging on SEO to get the tonnes of search traffic potentially coming to your website, and for free!

I guess I understand some of the reasons why courses out there may not focus on imparting SEO implementation skills and knowledge. One key reason is that not many people know it well enough and the other reason could be it takes some time to teach this stuff. And this may not fit into the course schedule.

And don’t get me wrong, SEO is not rocket science but it takes time to understand the pieces and it takes practices and patience to see it in action.

To me there are 4 key pieces to SEO:

1. SEO technical pre-work, get it done one-time and be done with
2. Keyword research, a very crucial step
3. On-site SEO, just follow the steps
4. Off-site SEO, share your content across various social media platforms

If you wish to learn white-hat SEO properly, do contact us for information.

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