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SEO and Affiliate Marketing

BY Shari Thurow | July 17, 2006

At a recent interactive marketing association
event in Chicago, a moderator was asked about
SEO (define) as an affiliate marketing strategy.

I was a bit surprised when the moderator
responded, "The event is focused on
affiliate marketing, not search."

Interestingly enough, the affiliate marketing
panel did discuss search in the realm of paid
advertising, which is one type of SEM (define).

"Hmmm," I thought. "That's rather unusual.
I wasn't aware paid search engine advertising
isn't a component of the search industry."

Then it hit me. The reason many advertising
and affiliate marketing agencies don't like
to focus on SEO is they don't fully comprehend
SEO and don't know how to carry out an effective
SEO campaign. Rather than admit their ignorance,
they prefer to focus on online marketing
strategies they claim to know well.

SEO Benefits

A recent MarketingSherpa study shows top organic
positions are clicked 20 percent of the time and
top paid-advertising positions are clicked 10 percent
of the time. However, if a site has a top organic
position and a top paid-advertising position, the
links to the site are clicked 60 percent of the time.
It's an unusual situation: 10 + 20 = 60.

Affiliate marketers' lack of SEO knowledge is a
huge mistake. With a well-constructed, user-friendly
affiliate site, advertising costs can be minimized.
Companies are missing out on key branding opportunities
as well.

Affiliate Marketers: Search Engine Friend or Foe?

Most of the time, affiliate marketers are a bane to
search engines. When I think of affiliate marketing
spam, I immediately think of all the Amazon.com
affiliates' doorway pages (define). Those can be
some pretty ugly Web sites. Maybe I should create a
new Web site and allude to what not to do in
affiliate Web site design.

On the other hand, some of the best Web sites I've
ever seen have been affiliate Web sites. For example,
one client doesn't sell directly to consumers. The
corporate Web site offers information on the company
and provides an overview of its products, but consumers
can't make a purchase on the site. They must go to an
affiliate to make a purchase. In this situation, going
to an affiliate is actually better for the consumer.

The affiliate is usually located near the consumer,
making it easier for the consumer to get the product
customized and delivered quickly.

The challenge in my client's affiliate SEO plan is
to provide unique content to the search engines
without exploiting them. Additionally, my client
doesn't want an overzealous affiliate to get the
corporate site and the entire affiliate network
into trouble. Everyone should benefit: consumers,
the corporate site, affiliates, and the search engines.

Affiliate SEO/SEM Plans

Affiliate management is a key ingredient of an
effective SEO/SEM plan. Too many corporations
make affiliate management as an afterthought, often
to the corporation's detriment.

I'm helping a nonprofit become unbanned in Google.
Unfortunately, helping sites get unbanned is a normal,
everyday part of my job. The organization itself
hasn't spammed Google. The Web site is quite user friendly,
and the organization is a well-established brand. There
are no technical reasons for the site not to appear in the
Google index. Yet after digging around for reasons for
a Google ban, we discovered the problem: affiliates gone
wild.

We asked our client if it had any legal agreements with
its affiliates that limited the types of search engine
strategies they could pursue. It didn't. So as part of the
unbanning process, we're working with the client's attorneys
to come up with an affiliate SEO agreement
(often, this is in conjunction with an affiliate advertising
agreement). Many corporations could save thousands of
dollars in lost search engine traffic if they created such
legal agreements before hiring affiliates.

As a part of the affiliate marketing SEO plan, corporations
should point out the importance of offering unique content
in addition to the corporations' content. For example,
effective information architecture is an extremely important
component of SEO. Are there ways affiliates can group and
categorize information that are better than how the corporate
site organizes it? Some products sell better in regional
markets than others.

Maybe the affiliate site could focus on the best
sellers for its region.

I've seen regional affiliate sites' cross-linking
(internal, page-to-page linking) vary by region.
By presenting a unique cross-linking structure,
affiliates provide unique information to the
commercial search engines and a 100 percent user-friendly
scent of information for customers.

Additionally, a FAQ, customer service, or help section
could be unique for each affiliate site. Many
affiliates work directly with customers. What questions
do those customers repeatedly pose? Having these
questions and their answers available in a FAQ, customer
service, or help section provides unique content for both
end users and search engines.

Finally, one of the biggest mistakes I see with affiliate
Web sites and corporations is forcing affiliates to use
a print catalog's exact wording. Print copywriting works
fine in a print medium; it doesn't necessarily work for
a Web site. Since affiliates often know their customers
quite well, they should be able to modify product
descriptions without deviating from the corporate
branding message.

The end result? Affiliate sites don't get filtered
out of search results due to duplicate content, and
customers find what they are searching for quickly
and easily.

Conclusion

Even though affiliate marketing spam is a huge problem
for the commercial Web search engines, search engine
representatives want to include affiliate content in
search results (both paid and organic), especially if
the content and content organization are unique.
Consumers appreciate content that's tailored to their
individual needs.

However, many advertising and affiliate marketing firms
deliberately discount SEO as an online marketing strategy
out of ignorance. This ignorance can get a corporate Web
site into trouble if affiliates aren't managed effectively,
and it can lead to thousands or millions of dollars in
missed sales opportunities. Effective search optimization
benefits everyone: end users, corporations, affiliates,
and search engines. Learning how to do SEO is not a bad
thing.

Meet Shari at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose,
August 7-10, 2006, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.