This is the follow up to Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing - Part 2

In the last part, we discussed SEO Basics, but we didn’t go further than On site SEO. In this part, we’ll be diving a bit further into SEO and discussing off site SEO.

Off site SEO involves Linking back to your website… this is where a lot of your traffic will come from, if not most. You will hear the term “linking strategies” as you learn more about Search Engine Optimization, but we’ll try to get into it a little bit in this post.

Linking to your website is called “backlinking” or backlinks… these links should use Keywords used on the page you’re linking to - so that the Spiders/Crawlers will view your link and your page with some importance to that keyword. Make sense?

A while back I submitted an Article to EzineArticles.com about Inbound links that might help understand linking strategies. (all links open in new tabs/windows)
How to Get the Best Inbound Link Traffic
SEO Link Engine
Inbound Links

Those article should give you a quick start on Linking. They’re pretty straight forward.

Links back to your website need to be relevant… this means that if you own a Blog about Internet Marketing, you should NOT be looking for links coming from a website about Real Estate. This kind of linking strategy is no good. Google loves relevancy in everything… Websites, Links, PPC Ads, Landing pages, everything… there’s no reason to try to get a ton of links for $30 from someone on Digital Point just because it sounds good.

Quantity cannot beat Quality when it comes to links…keep that in mind. It’s better to have 1,000 links coming from Relevant websites than it is to have 100,000 coming from “where ever”.

Replying to blogs similar to yours (please do not reply just to get a link, blog owners do not appreciate it and shady acts are shady acts) with quality replies can definitely be beneficial if the blogs don’t have “NoFollow” tags. Lately there seems to be a lot of “NoFollow” blogs popping up everywhere… I’m not sure why anyone would do this to their own site (what goes around comes around… nothing = nothing), but they’re becoming a trend lately.

You can read more on NoFollow here.

You can also ask Website owners if they will link to you (Reciprocal), but don’t expect anything just because you asked. Remember that Websites are like Real Estate! They really are. To ask someone to stick a sign on their grass is asking for a lot - and normally you either won’t get a reply back or you’ll get a no…

Backlinks can also improve your Google PageRank, but we won’t get into that here… You can read about Google PR here.

So to recap - There’s 2 parts of Search Engine Optimization… On site SEO and Off site SEO.

On site SEO is optimizing your website and it’s pages for keywords that you want to compete within the Search Engine results with.

Off site SEO is using Backlinks, using keywords as the Anchor text, to get traffic (including Spiders/Crawlers) to your website.

Just remember that SEO is based on Relevance. I highly recommend that you learn more about Search Engine Optimization, especially LSI, as it is one of the most important aspects of being an Affiliate Marketer. There are no secrets to SEO, unless you dive into the murky waters of BlackHat SEO, which is not useful as an Affiliate looking to build a solid business…

While we’re on the subject of Backlinks, let’s get into Social Media…

As you have probably noticed over the past few years - Web 2.0 is alive and well and it’s not going anywhere (although there were so many who doubted Web 2.0!), except forward…

Social Media sites keep popping up and Advanced Marketers are taking advantage of these popular sites as soon as they see something shiny

Bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon can bring a TON of traffic to your website in a very, VERY quick manner… make sure your server/host can handle large traffic spikes when you begin to dig deeper.

I have been learning a lot more about Social Media over the past few weeks through Jack Humphrey’s Social Power Linking program, and I’m very happy with the results as of late. But there’s a lot more to learn.

StomperNet has just released a very expensive, yet very professional Program that teaches you a lot about these Social Media sites and how to obtain traffic… but it IS expensive. Is it worth it? I do not know at this point… I haven’t gotten a chance to check it out, nor will I anytime soon at the current price. Probably unfortunate, but I just can’t afford it at this point in time!

Squidoo, Hubpages, Propeller and other Web 2.0 Content sites get great Search Engine rankings - even with brand new pages. It’s amazing how quickly these sites not only get indexed - but how HIGH they rank for even very competitive results.

Learn as much as you can about these new Web 2.0 sites and sign up to each one… just in case.

Obviously - if you are looking for a lot of traffic to your website, writing and submitting articles will get you A TON of traffic if you use the right keywords…

As an Affiliate - you will see GREAT rankings by reviewing new products. Write articles (be careful with EzineArticles [EA] as they are VERY picky with articles!), create lenses at Squidoo, create a new hub at Hubpages and submit Pages to Digg, Propeller and Stumble pages as well.

In the next few days I will try to provide a great list of Web 2.0/Affiliate resources that will help you in your Affiliate Marketing Efforts!

Hope this Article helps! Be on the lookout for Part 4… it’s going to get A LOT better! =)