Keywords are literally the heart and soul of any website; without them you’re just
another nobody taking up wasted space on the World Wide Web. Now, you may think
to yourself, “Yeah, we covered all of the industry basics for affiliate marketing,” and
maybe you’re right, but there are probably also ten other completely different ways that
you should be promoting your products as well. This article will bring you up to speed
on what you need to know about keywords and keyphrases, plus a little bit of help on
finding the perfect ones for your affiliate website.
Affiliate Keywords- Where to Start
Every industry has several obvious keywords that customers relate with, and as a domain
owner your primary job is to rank as highly as possible in each of them. If we were
building an affiliate website about “deep sea fishing”, for example, those three words
should be more prevalent on your website than any other phrase. You’d also talk about
deep sea fishing poles, bait, tackle, destinations, and a host of other topics as well, but
each of those keyword strings would start with what your website is really about. In
affiliate marketing, it’s the only way to make sales.
Building on Keywords
Once your affiliate website is optimized for the main keyphrases that customers look for,
it’s time to kick it up a gear and get a little bit creative–called using long tail searches. Keyphrases like “Antigua deep
sea fishing” or “November deep sea fishing” is making your affiliate marketing a whole
lot more specialized yet they are only taking up a single page of text, so feel free to touch
on things like cities, seasons, and other areas of interest. The key to a successful affiliate
marketing campaign is to pull in revenue from as many sources as possible.
How to Beat other Affiliates in Ranking
If you type “deep sea fishing” into a search engine, for example, the top two results (not
counting sponsored ads) are for territorial fishing in two different US cities. The #1 slot
goes to an affiliate website that has a total of fourteen pages of text and #2 has even less,
so you can see that this is a topic that could easily be captured with about twenty-five
pages of keyword text and a few quality backlinks.
Now, you may have noticed that Yahoo includes the keyphrase “deep sea fish” in its
results, so that may sound like a better way to go than with the “fishing” part added on.
If you look at the results for just the “deep sea fish” keyphrase though, you’ll see that the
top few ranks are huge websites with hundreds of links each. It is still quite possible to
overcome them on Google or Yahoo but it’s going to take a whole lot more work, so you
might as well take the path with the least resistance for faster initial affiliate marketing
profits.
Using Technology for Keyword Ranking
You also might have figured out that by now that we have yet to mention those websites
that perform custom keyword analysis for clients. There is a perfectly good reason for
that; all the key words and phrases you’ll ever need are already right there for you in any
search engine. Remember, the goal in affiliate website building is not to be the most
comprehensive site on the net; it is much simpler than that. Your only starting goal
should be to outrank your competition in the main keyphrases for your affiliate marketing
industry, and then seize those smaller market strings over time.