Very Quick 25 Factors For A Successful Affiliate SEO

Just following up on the SEO Search Ranking Factors (before I spend the next few hours going through some hotjiggedy research) here's my very quick 25 factors for a successful affiliate SEO):

Apologies for "SEO speak", and they're somewhat in order of importants

1. relevant links from valued and diverse external sites.
2. Keywords at the front of the page title
3. organised architecture of site design parent / child relationships in the inter-category sense
4. external anchor text matching target keywords
5. get geo-targetting right
6. as much unique, useful content as possible and make sure that its not copied (or if it is, make sure its referenced)
7. useful, to a degree, to have kwd, domains i.e. product domains
8. use other H tags wisely
9. Variable KW phrases in h1's
10. target KW in internal crawlable anchortext
11. ensure that you have suitable linkability of your domain/page
12. try and increase the number of internal links to the most important pages
13. use of error-free sitemaps in GWT
14. get KW phrases within variable text at the top 50-100 words on the page
15. make the title/snippet more attractive to increase CTR from SERPS with the resultant secondary effects
16. check regularly for server issues
17. reduce template similarity between sections and avoid nasty boilerplates
18. server response time / page load time
19. grow inbound links organically (or make it look like they are)
20. get away from long, complicated url structures
21. take note of searchwiki and try and influence it
22. adding fresh content / feed content from other sources
23. appropriate alt text
24. site neighbourhood (linking and hosting)
25. largely different meta kw and desc
26. and a free one: try and link out to other relevant sites

The above is just meant to be a starters whilst I update my own (more comprehensive) list of influencing facors (or golden rules as I call them to clients).

And sorry for not blogging recently, I've been a tad busy. But the upshot is I should be blogging soon about my multi-industry review of link-building strategies which looks at a few affiliate sites and tries to accurately determine which factors do actually improve rankings.

Lesson In Life: Remove The Weakest Links

I'm a lazy git. I'll do what ever's easiest when it comes to my affiliate stuff as I'm just so busy with client work. As part of that laziness I'd use the ShopWindow from Affiliate Window to find products and deep link. I wasn't that lazy as I worked out a way to include tracking codes into it to give the product details etc. After spending some time doing this I "reverted to type" and started to irregularly check my affiliate emails - preferring instead to use them to find product info etc.

Big mistake! I've missed all of these "Less than 10% of Shop Window quota remaining for account" emails and now the tool that I use for a good proportion of my deep-linking is down, kapput, with no sign of life.

soap_error Object ( [sCode] => ns1:Client.LIMIT_1 [sString] => Insufficient Quota [sDetails] => getMerchant: You have used all your operations quota )
1
soap_error Object ( [sCode] => ns1:Client.LIMIT_1 [sString] => Insufficient Quota [sDetails] => getMerchant: You have used all your operations quota )
1

I'm glad I started using Short URL to track deep links and merchant category pages, but its still going to be a pain in the arse waiting for the Shop Window quota to reset.

So a quick tip: When you're in Affiliate mode, ensure that you try and cut out as many weak links, or opportunity for failure as possible. Get yourself a decent deeplinking / link-cloaking tool and try and find a productive way of sifting the important emails from the unimportant ones.

p.s. my fecking hosting company won't even let me upload a robots.txt to prevent the bots from crawling the shopwindow site - fecking great!

Wednesday morning affiliate FAIL!

Update: George has refreshed it. I need to get my arse in gear big time on it!