Gaining links for SEO on your affiliate website

One of the key parts of optimising your website for search engines is building in-bound links from other websites. The best place you can possibly have a link is in a contextually rich area i.e. on a page that has plenty of good written copy around the keywords that you’re hoping to rank well in.

Gaining these in-bound links is an art form that many get horribly wrong.

Some believe it’s ok to send a templated email to every email address they can find on the internet asking for a link exchange. Google and other search engines are aware this goes on and have long since put things in place to check for reciprocal links from the same site where there is no copy or wording around the link that’s relevant. It might be worth it if you had hundreds of links but a single, high quality, contextual link from the right website to your own affiliate website will be significantly more valuable.

A recent form of this type of email is one where the link researcher has identified a website they would like to have a link on and they understand that there needs to be a reason for the website owner to put that link up. Bringing in the contextual idea into the same mix, it makes sense to offer the website some uniquely written contextual content which includes a link back to your website (with them knowing of course) in exchange for that link.

In this scenario, both websites gain. One receives free written copy relevant to their website (if it’s done right) and the other receives an in-bound link that’s going to gain them better search engine optimisation through links.

Here’s an email I have recently seen that does this very well;

We had a couple of ideas which I hope you will find useful:
1) We can have our editorial team research and hand write some content for you to add to a page on [site removed]. We will agree a subject with you that is relevant to both of our sites (it won`t be a sales pitch for us!) and will include a single simple text link back to a relevant content page on our site. The content will be uniquely written for you and will not be re-used elsewhere. It should be helpful to your visitors and of course the search engines, as will the presence of a relevant link back to us. Hopefully we will also benefit from the link in the longer term.
- OR -
2) We can exchange links with you, directly from a relevant content page on [site removed]. We will explain where links are located on our site (on properly indexed and ranked pages) when you reply - we don`t have a links page as such - we link from the most relevant page to each partner.
There are of course no costs for you associated with either approach.

While this does take time and energy for the site looking to receive the in-bound link, both benefit.

This has to be probably the most compelling new version of link-exchange emails that I’ve seen.

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Google Ad Manager could change the affiliate industry ..

If you hadn’t heard that Google recently bought DoubleClick (still seeking commission appovals) then you must have been hiding under a rock for the past six months.

The question when they did this was what were they going to do with it?

Late last year I spoke with the Australian DoubleClick sales rep who essentially said they believed it would be business as usual.

It looks like Google have now shown exactly why they bought DoubleClick and it follows their new standard practice. Buy up a big company where small businesses can’t afford their services, roll a limited version of their services out for free to the small business, drop the price to enterprises and bring on ten times the number of enterprises thereby effectively becoming the default provider in the market.

This is what Google Ad Manager looks like it could achieve.

From an affiliate perspective, the constant complaint (or frustration for affiliate managers) is that affiliates just don’t have sophisticated systems for optimising advertising placements across their site. This has always been the area of enterprise level websites only.

Google Ad Manager has just launched its website as “Invitation Only” with a basic tour of what the package will be when it’s available.

It’s every affiliate’s dream.

A simple system the affiliate (or any publisher) can roll out on a new site to start serving adverts, optimising adverts and pulling them up and down based on timing and impressions.

To date the only options have been to do some basic HTML, use a system that an affiliate program has built just for themselves or go the whole way and install an open-source version of an ad server (like OpenAds). None of these provided an easy, quick or intelligent solution across multiple sites with many banner spots.

Check out the new Google Ad Manager yourself. Hopefully it’ll be available for more publishers soon.

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URL’s in Affiliate Promotional Material

In my past life as an Affiliate Manager, the first time I thought about URL’s in affiliate promotional material was when a very influential affiliate came to me and said;

I will not promote your site because all of your promotional material includes your URL on it.

I was quite properly shocked.

I hadn’t even considered that an issue (this was a good few years ago now) when we were in development of the promotional material for affiliates.

After talking with the affiliate for some time, it came down to choice in the market.

This affiliate had the option of promoting many different affiliate programs, they were all pushing for his attention and prominent spots on his homepage. When this situation occurs (an affiliate dream scenario) then it’s all of the small things which a program can offer the affiliate which make the difference on their decision to pick a particular product or program to go with.

In this case it was the fact that the affiliate was not interested in the program promoting the main site URL through his affiliate banners as that would mean a percentage of viewers (even if it was small) would not click the advertising but would instead type the domain name directly into their browser. They may even remember the URL from the affiliates advertising and later on type it in.

If the URL had not been there they would have been a lot more likely to either click the banner to get to the site or to come back to the affiliates site to find the resource again.

This may be a very small percentage of people but when you’re talking about super-affiliates with millions of page views per day across their sites then the percentages all start to add up and there’s just no reason for them to promote a banner with a URL on it as opposed to one without.

I was thinking about this recently as I was contacted directly by an affiliate manager about a site, I agreed to post their banner on the homepage of the site as a trial run however on getting into their banner farm there was no banner which didn’t have the URL splashed across it. Needless to say I didn’t put them on my homepage and have since requested a banner without the URL.

Something to think about it you’re an affiliate looking to promote a program or an affiliate manager working with your creative team to come up with advertising options.

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New Zealand Online Research for Affiliates

One of the difficult things when working in the New Zealand online market is finding just the right place to research the habits of New Zealanders on the web.

Many of the tools which you might use for a global campaign are not as relevant to the New Zealand web. A good example here is Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool. This is an excellent online research tool for your affiliate marketing keywords on a particular topic when you’re interested in promoting in the US affiliate market however it is reasonably limited from a New Zealand specific market perspective.

So, you need to have a good look around and find some research tools as well as something like the Google keyword suggestions which will give you a better perspective on the local New Zealand angle.

One excellent local option here is the Hitwise New Zealand Data Center which has monthly reports like the Top 20 NZ Websites (here), the Top 4 Fast Moving Websites in NZ (here) and of course the most useful Top 10 Industry Keywords in NZ (here).

Keeping an eye on what’s going on from this sort of freely available New Zealand online research data is going to give you a good chance to make sure your research is as targeted to the New Zealand demographic as possible.

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Advanced Google Operators

Google Search has many advanced operators, which are allow words with special functions available when using their search.

This is a little off topic but very useful as a reference to the advance operators on Google. I’ll be using this myself as it’s good to have a visual reference somewhere.

Here is a list of the Google advanced operator examples;

If there are any questions about these you can find out more information here.

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Updated advertising policy on Adsense

Google Adsense have updated their advertising policy with a couple of quite substantial changes.

The simplest one is the ability to add more than one (up to three) link ad units across a site. Previously these have only been allowed as one link ad unit per page. With the high click-through rates received from link ad units when correctly placed on a website, this will be a popular move with online advertisers (in all markets including NZ).

Conversely I have already read a few blog posts where other bloggers are saying this is pushing the Adsense program too close to the situation where a user is being tricked into a click (due to the similarity between the link ad unit format and a typical navigational function within a site).

Probably the biggest change is that Google is now requiring its Adsense publishers to conform to Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines which it uses for Adwords advertisers. From Adsense;

…you might already be familiar with these guidelines, which are intended to provide a better experience for users, advertisers, and publishers alike. If you use any kind of online advertising, know that these guidelines encourage publishers to, among other things, create sites with simple navigation and substantial, useful content.

Many different elements go into a “Quality Score” which are based around a very well established although incredibly subjective ideas on usability and content control. For example;

Starting with your ad, each interaction you have with your potential and existing customers should be geared towards building a trusting relationship. To avoid leading users astray:

* Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
* Openly share information about your business. Clearly define what your business is or does.
* Deliver products, goods, and services as promised on your site.

The key question here will be the implementation of decisions from Google representatives. No two Google reps are likely to see the same site in the same light. Hopefully there are some very tight guidelines around more than one person being involved in removing a site.

As you can imagine, it’s going to be the almighty dollar that rules the decision on how the site is dealt with. If you’re making Google a fortune through Adsense I would expect a friendly phone call to discuss your usability however for all of the “for Adsense” sites which have been built up over the last few years, watchout!

See more details directly from Google here.

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New Zealand SME Expo ..

I was at the Auckland small business expo for the day yesterday and have to say I was impressed with the level of online presence in the expo.

Many exhibits (there were 500+ I believe) were pushing their website as the main point of contact for the company. It makes sense to do this however I wasn’t sure how prevalent it would be in the New Zealand SME market before I arrived.

There were a lot of web development firms who were pushing their abilities to design, develop, promote and do anything else you can think of with an SME’s online presence however I was surprised that not a single one was promoting the use of affiliate programs for SME’s to bring in traffic to their site.

apnfinda had a heavy showing at the show however this was probably the only company there who were interested in online advertising and promotion. Every other online company (and there were a lot) were only interested in the development dollar and on discussions with most of them the all said “Oh yeah, we throw in some Google Adsense for the website as well but marketing is really up to the site”.

What a waste!

All these SME’s wanting to promote their websites, all these web development companies and only one online advertising company?

The Director of apnfind in his local search seminar was onto it, discussing the confounding problem that NZ business only spends 2.5% of its marketing budgets on online advertising where Australia is on 8.9% and the UK on 18%. This was especially shown to be lacking by the actual percentages of media consumption in New Zealand where online sites take roughly 40% of the media time of consumers.

Very insightful.

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New Version of Google Analytics

If you don’t already, you should be using the free Google Analytics tool as (at the least) an additional statistics package for your affiliate website. It offers so much more than many costly packages and it’s free!

This week Google have announced a completely new version of the Google Analytics interface and reporting on the Google Analytics Blog).

After an initial look through it’s an impressively updated GUI which does bring a lot of the features available already to the forefront of the reporting. The ability to email results will be very useful.

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Google Adsense / Google Adwords tidbit

I learnt something new yesterday which may have been common knowledge to a fair number of people but changed one of the assumptions I had about how the Google Adsense program shows adverts.

We’ve all seen how Adsense can sometimes show only a single advert in a large advert box. So you’ll end up with a skyscraper advert (120×600) which only has a single advert in the entire area in huge text.

Now here’s the thing; I always assumed that this was due to the lack of inventory (that is people who are bidding for the adverts that are listing on your sites keywords) however it turns out that this is actually a feature of Google Adsense where, if an advertiser is bidding well more than the next few bidders, then that advert will take precedence over both of the next adverts and only it will show. This can also happen if a Google Adwords advertiser is specifically targeting adverts to your site.

I can’t say I really like this feature much from a design stand-point as you can end up with some pretty glaringly ugly adverts on your site when you though you were going to have some nice text listings. The main positive is really that this will increase the revenue on your site.

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Heads-up for Domain Name Affiliates

The New Zealand Domain Name Commission is reducing the .nz wholesale doman registration fee by 14% in July 2007.

This is going to take a lot of work by the domain registrars who are at the cheap registration end of the market to get their new pricing structures sorted out. Althought, as mentioned in the announcement below there is no direct pressure from the commission for the retail prices to drop;


.nz Domain Name Fee Reduction Announced - 29 Mar 2007 09:15

InternetNZ (The Internet Society of New Zealand) is reducing by 14% the wholesale domain name fee charged to authorised .nz registrars by .nz Registry Services (NZRS).

Colin Jackson, InternetNZ President, says “The InternetNZ Council is pleased to confirm that the wholesale domain name fee will reduce to $1.50 per domain name per month, down from $1.75 per domain name per month.” These figures are exclusive of GST.

The new wholesale fee will apply from 1 July 2007. “We trust that early notification of the lower fee will assist registrars in their planning,” says Jackson.

The decision to reduce the fee is the outcome of a joint recommendation from the .nz Oversight Committee (NZOC) and NZRS to the InternetNZ Council.

Dr Frank March, Chair of the NZOC, says he hopes that the lower fee will encourage the continuation of a healthy growth rate in the registration of new domain names. However he cautions “There is no obligation on registrars to pass on any savings they make in a reduction of the wholesale fee.”

Dr March continues “The .nz market is a competitive environment and I hope that the range of authorised registrars will encourage some to reduce the retail price.”

The reduction in the wholesale domain name fee is the second drop since NZRS took over running the .nz domain name register in October 2002.

NZRS Chair, Anne Urlwin, says “The result of the fee review is a successful outcome for everyone. We take our responsibilities in managing the .nz register seriously, and are pleased that we’ve achieved efficiencies in our systems that enable this decrease in the fee to registrars.”

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