Affiliate Marketing | Website Optimization
And Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Website Optimization
And Your Affiliate Marketing Business



Will Your Customers Be Able To Find You?

Are You Making Use Of Keyword Tools?

Finding optimal keywords and keyword phrases that are appropriate for your website theme is a major part of website optimization and attracting traffic to your website, and thus making it an integral part of your affiliate marketing success.

In order for visitors to reach your website - you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them to your site, and this is done by creating carefully chosen keywords.   If you don’t use keywords that are related to your theme - or keywords that receive a significant amount of searches - websurfers will not be able to find your website when they conduct searches.  And without traffic, there will be no affiliate sales (or whatever other products or services you offer from your website).

Keyword research is a process of trying to find out what your potential customers/clients are searching for online - and what keywords or keyword phrases they’re using to find it.   Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy, and if they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it.

Therefore, keyword research is the process you will need to go through for each page of your website, finding a main keyword for each page as well as a few related long tail keywords for use in your content.

Start your search by first brainstorming as many keywords and phrases as you can come up with that pertain to your site’s theme. Then, to help generate your final list, you can enlist the help of free website tools for free keyword search - a number of which you can find online.

Once you have entered your targeted keyword or phrase into the search box of the keyword search tool, you will be shown a list of related terms and the volume of searches that each one has received in a given time period (30 to 90 days).  Look for keywords that ideally have high search numbers, but with low competition so that you at least have a chance to compete with other similar websites.

Try A Free Keyword Search Tool:

Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Keyword Playground

Overture Suggestion Tool

If you use the Google Adwords tool, click on the “Match Type” dropdown box and change the search from “Broad” to “Exact”, which will give you a closer number of the searches for your exact phrase.  And under “Columns To Display”, you can include “Show Estimated Avg. CPC” to display the cost-per-click of each of your keywords.

Keyword Analysis

It’s also a good idea to analyze the competition for your keyword phrases - and one of the fee-based keyword tools such as Wordtracker can speed this process up considerably. With Wordtracker, you will even be able to export your list to be entered into Excel spreadsheets so that you can eliminate unrelated keywords - leaving only the ones you can use effectively.

Optionally, you can key each one of your keywords or phrases into the Google search box, and get the number of competition for that keyword.  This will take some time and the results will not tell you everything you need to know, but it’s better than nothing - and it’s free.

You will need to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website, meaning those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just check your site out and move on.  The more specific your keyword/phrase is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to make a purchase will find you, and the less competition you will have.

You want to find people who are ready to take action or make a purchase, and this requires some tinkering with your keywords until you find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.  If your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site decreases dramatically.

As you’re doing your keyword research and narrowing down your list to the best keywords for your site, some phrases that you end up with won’t make a lot of sense as far as writing your content, but you can still use those as tags on your blog posts, and other places where you would normally add tags (where they don’t necessarily have to make sense). For example: “insert into keywords values dog health problem” may have a large number of searches (go figure) but it would be difficult to fit it sensibly into an article.

Put Your Best Keywords To Work…

After you have researched extensively, you will hopefully have narrowed your list down to a few good keywords and phrases related to your site, that have good traffic potential, and that can be easily used to create informative articles. Now you can create your content around your chosen keywords - optimizing each post or page of your website for a main keyword from your list.

Once you’ve written your content - you want to work your keywords throughout the copy naturally - placing your main keyword at or near the beginning, and also in the last paragraph of your post/page. Relevant, useful, keyword-rich articles on your website will help to bring traffic - and your visitors will be more likely to stay once they get there.

The preferred number of times your keywords appear in your article (keyword density) varies from one search engine to another, but around 2 - 5% (10 - 25 words per 500-word article) seems to be the optimum number.

You want your keywords and phrases to appear often enough that the search engines give relevance to them for a search with those words - but at the same time - you don’t want to stuff your article with so many keywords that it is interpreted as spamming.  It also helps to bold a couple of your keywords in your article because words that are in bold stand out to search engines.

Other Places To Use Your Keywords

Besides your article, there are other fields on your site that should include your keywords as well - such as:

  • Title Tag
  • Meta Description Tags
  • Meta Keywords Tag
  • Headings
  • Anchor Text/ Navigational Links

The Title Tag is what people will see in the search engines, so make it compelling. This tag goes in between the opening and closing HEAD tags - < HEAD>< /HEAD> - and should contain a short, keyword-rich description of what the post is about.

Meta Keywords Tags:

The Meta Keywords Tag is where you list the keywords and keyword phrases that you’re using for that specific page.

Meta Description Tags:

This is where you enter a brief summary of your website’s content.

Anchor Text - The words - or keywords - you use in the title of a link.

You can determine if you have missed any obvious keywords or phrases by checking the meta tags of competitor or similar websites to yours. To do this, view the “page source” of that page. Just look for a tag in the header that says: < meta name= “Keywords” content= (without the spaces) and see what keywords they have included in their meta tags.

Another way that I have found to uncover some useful keywords is to check the stats for your website.  In Stat Counter - http://www.statcounter.com - for instance, you can click on “Keyword Analysis” and find keywords or combinations of words that people are actually using to find your site.

Some of these keywords may be something that you had not considered before, and they may not even be used in your content.  But once you have this information, try to find a way to incorporate your findings into the content on your website, making sure you use them in such a way that they make sense and don’t look like spam.

Website optimization is a necessary part of your affiliate marketing business, and the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign for your website is what will ultimately generate the rewards of your business. And whether you choose to use a fee-based or a free keyword search tool, you will greatly enhance the chances of your website being found if you will take the time and effort to optimize your website content for the search engines.

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