Link Building… The Key to Affiliate Marketing
Let’s get something straight… Your links need to be relevant to your site if you want them to ever have any SEO value in the first place. Back in the day, Google mainly looked at how many links you had; they didn’t care where your links were coming from. Today; however, things are a little different. Google is not only paying attention to how many links you have, but what types of links they are, where they are coming from, the priority of ranking assigned to your linking partner ect.
In order to successfully build links to your site, you first have to recognize what keyword you are attempting to rank for, then you can begin to work on link building. If you are attempting to target a keyword like “affiliate marketing” then you should link to your site through that keyphrase. This goes for links both on and off of your site. For example, instead of calling your homepage “Home”, call it “Affiliate Marketing” or whatever keyphrase you are targeting.
Use this linking principle throughout all of your article writing efforts and you shouldn’t go wrong. As far as going for true Partner Links, you are going to have to follow a few additional rules. First off, no one is going to want to exchange links with you for a reciprocal link, if your Links or Partners page is not indexed in Google. Therefore; your first challenge is to get your Partners page indexed. This may sound easy, but it may take a bit of work because the GoogleBot knows all about Partners pages.
Your Partner Links should be very relevant to your site, most likely they may even bare some resemblance to your site as well. This will be good as far as indicating relevancy to Google. By now you should have realized that Relevancy is the most important piece of the puzzle.
Another question you may have is, “How many Partner Links do I need for my site?” I have some good news for you here. You do not need very many Partner Links. This may not seem to make any sense at first, but it is actually quite simple. If you put too many links on a page without content, then GoogleBot will believe that the page is a link farm. (Page with just loads of irrelevant links.) Link farms are popular from the early stages of the internet when it didn’t matter what quality of link you had, just that you had a lot of them.
I believe that the magic number is 25. It may have changed plus or minus 2 or 3 from time to time, but the number you want to target is 25 very relevant Partner Links. This will reserve your Partners Page as a page that will be looked at differently by GoogleBot. Additionally, you will benefit from the link relevancy of your reciprocal links that are placed on these pages since they will increase the relevance of your Partners Page itself.