If you are doing affiliate marketing, you need to know Search Engine Optimization (SEO), especialy in the longer term. As an affiliate, you need to promote your affiliate products in your specific niche area. There are a number of ways to do it and SEO should definitely be part of your plan to drive free organic traffic to your website.

If you are relatively new to SEO, do read up How To Do SEO and SEO For Beginners.

SEO may initially seem hard but it really isn’t. Even if you don’t fully understand every SEO ranking factor, you should start implementing for those that you understand.

SEO implementation plan for affiliates is not much different from any other websites. However, it pays for affiliates to give even more attention to keyword research.

Keyword Research

As an affiliate, you generally have a narrow niche market though as you build up your branding and following, you might be able to expand this and market other products to your existing customer base.

I recommend you do your keyword research more comprehensively, have a list of 50 keywords or more. You should have a mix of keywords with different competition levels and search volumes but I would still go for long-tailed keywords. You can always work on short-tailed keywords later.

A number of these keywords should definitely be low competition keywords.

Keep a list of these keywords and tabulate them with these fields: search volume, competition level, SEO ranking. I won’t be too concerned about the SEO ranking for the first 2 months, but I will start to track ranking performance after that.

You would then want to develop a plan how you want to link your articles (related to each keyword) to one another and build up your internal link structure.

Make use of Search Analytics of Google Webmaster to fine-tune your keyword focus, which ones you want to spend more time optimizing.

You can also actively find out what your competitors are doing. Look at the websites occupying top 3 ranking positions for your keywords. See whether they are also affiliates, what other keywords they are targeting and what affiliate products they are selling.

By doing this, you may then want to refine your keyword list and you can even source for additional affiliate products which are of interest.

If you are interested in affiliate marketing but don’t yet have the proper know-how, then try out a free account with Wealthy Affiliates, it is an online platform with video-based tutorials to bring you through the entire learning cycle.

Good luck with your affiliate business.