SEO tips for affiliates

Defining and explaining SEO

Optimising for search engines can be defined as the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through organic.

In order to fully understand the concept, we will break down the components included in the definition.

• Quality of traffic: the quality of the traffic depends on whether there is a match present between your visitors need and what you offer. It will not be quality traffic if visitors come to your site because Google tells them you have a streaming service, while what you really offer is vlogs. You want to attract visitors with a genuine interest for what you are offering.
• Quantity of traffic: how much overall traffic you drive. The more quality traffic, the better.
• Organic results: search engines include both paid and organic traffic. While paid traffic are paid ads, organic traffic is traffic you don’t have to pay for.

Search engine crawlers gather information about all the content they can find on the internet. The information they find is used to build an online index. Through an algorithm, the index is matched with what is being searched for.

Search engine optimisation

By structuring the content on your website in a way that is suitable for search engines, you can increase your chances of becoming visible and receive more website visitors.

Ranking in search engines is becoming more important than ever. Consumers don’t spend time browsing the search results. This is not a result of laziness, but rather the fact that search engines are precise enough to more or less immediately find what you are looking for and place it amongst the top results. Therefore, it is of less use for users to browse the search engine results.

SEO might sound very technical, but with simple steps and limited knowledge, you can facilitate for increased visibility in search results.

Search engine optimization is a successive process, in which changes and optimization complement each other in creating a good user experience, while simultaneously achieving as high rankings as possible. Search engine optimization is often about doing few, but well chosen adjustments on certain parts of your website. We have gathered x basic components to review and adjust if required:
Base content on terms your audience is searching for
It can be hard to optimise a website without knowledge about what your visitors are looking for. Use common sense as a starting point. Take it that you write about running and equipment. Visitors ending up at your website might search for:

«Running watches»
«Running shoes»
«Running gear»

Consider what your visitors might search for and note down your suggestions. Another idea is to ask them directly. Research the keywords to determine whether or not they are easy to rank for. Use the knowledge you attain and make sure to include the keywords in your titles and content.

Use proper titles <title>

The title of landing pages should contain keywords that are important for your website and on which you want to rank in search engines. Ideally, the title should be unique for every page, but for larger websites with thousands or even hundred thousands of pages, this can be impossible.

Include meta tag «description»

The meta tag description gives a longer description of a page than a page title. In some cases Google can use the description directly in the search engines. In other words, you want to use an appealing text that leads the visitor to want to click on your site in the search result.

Use suitable headlines <h1>

The H1 tag is the title tag of each landing page and should ideally convey the same message and keywords as the title tag without being identical.

Structure files and folders

Files and folders on your website need to have a simple structure and relevant names. This will ease the job for search engine crawlers, and search engines like components that are crawler-friendly. Save images in a certain folder and give both folders and images short, but descriptive names.

Create an XML Sitemap

Create an XML Sitemap and send this file to Google. This does not require any deep, technical knowledge. If you have a Wordpress blog, there is even a plugin for this matter.

Add «alt»-texts to images

When adding images to your website you should also add «alt»-texts. This is a text that describes the image and is shown if the image for some reason can not be displayed. A search engine crawler can do a lot, but they can not see your images. «Alt»-texts give you the possibility to make the site more user and crawler friendly by adding more relevant content for your website.

Blocked links

Maybe you have a comment field on your site? Make sure that links are specified rel=”nofollow” in order to avoid search engines to proceed via undesired or inappropriate content that is written in the comment field.

And lastly: offer content of quality. Interesting sites will in the long run always generate higher rankings in the search engines.