Top 10 Heinous SEO Mistakes Committed By Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate marketing is indeed powerful when combined with SEO and affiliate goals that move towards the same direction. If you as an affiliate marketer are ignoring SEO, then you are missing out on substantial and sustainable growth. This will hurt the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing campaign. Avoiding these common blunders is the best way to move forward to build and execute a successful affiliate campaign. According to expert advice from 2 major SEO strategists Scott Polk and Adam Reimer, we have chalked out at least 10 SEO mistakes committed by affiliate marketers that would otherwise ruin their affiliate marketing campaign.

First Mistake

Stressing and focusing on keywords rather than solutions – Many affiliate sites plug in their keywords in their landing page with thinking how this would benefit their customers. This is the number one mistake most of the affiliates make. One should stress on providing solutions ‘keywords provide you with traffic and thus they are important as well, you can use them as a base, but creating solutions where your affiliate relationships will be able to provide some kind of value and help identify and solve a problem.

If you have a home repair site or some kind of hardware, do not optimize it for sub-pumps and not for drywall. Rather, try and optimize it for fixing a dry hole within the drywall and incorporate its products within it. Think about the tools when you have the sub pump. Also, think of the tools and the parts that you would need to solve any issues and thus using affiliate links for them. Thus, it is advised not to rely on keywords a whole lot, show your customers how much better your life is going to turn out once they buy your product.

Second Mistake

Relying on your affiliate marketing system as you’re only your only revenue stream – Affiliate marketing is no business model instead it should be treated as a revenue channel. If you are calling yourself an affiliate, there is nothing wrong with it. just try and not treat your business in such a manner. It is some kind of revenue generation model if this is the only channel that is being used to monetize your traffic. Then this may be a wrong process and invite trouble. Diversifying your revenue channels will is a smart way to handle it. Bottom line; do not put all your eggs in one basket and that is the affiliate marketing basket.

Third Mistake

Content needs to be genuine and original – Most affiliate marketing websites includes lists of products with no or minimal content. PPC ads would be effective for such websites; but once your advertising money and power runs out, you will be in deep trouble. Your business will be in jeopardy. A really good site and produces unique and good value for all of your visitors. Why on earth would your website rank over an originator of the real content? There might be some sites that may be ranking well, but most of the sites that duplicate content have the lesser chance of ranking well on the search engines. In order to rank well on search engines, you have to add value to your website. Bottom line is that any affiliate site will help earn several organic backlinks that will entice customers from coming back again and again for more info.

Fourth Mistake

Forgetting deletion of plug-ins and themes that are inactive – Delete the most inactive plug-ins and themes that which is a sign of being extra careful about cybersecurity and privacy of the customer. Do not forget to delete the plug-ins and themes that are mostly inactive.

If you do not delete your inactive themes that sit idly on your site, this means that these plug-ins and themes may pose a serious threat to the cybersecurity. So it’s up to you to delete them from time to time so that this does not provide a threat to your cybersecurity because they are easily targeted by hackers otherwise. If you are regularly updating, then find ways to exploit your old code and hiding malicious code by creating a backdoor to your own site. Hackers might also hide some kind of malicious code within the directory uploads including the WP-includes directory and the wp-config.php file.

Combine suspicious code with your website and update them every now and then to its latest versions. Remove any kind of inactive themes and plug-ins when possible. All the plug-ins and the themes should be up to date. In case you are not using some themes and plug-ins, try and remove them.

Fifth Mistake

Creating Meta descriptions for those websites that do not have a Meta description or duplicating a Meta description – Your Meta descriptions and your titles should be genuine, relevant and unique. If you have rich snippets in your mates, then chances are they will stand out in the SERPs. This will go a long way towards setting you apart from your other competitor in the market. If you don’t have the right resources for optimizing or writing your Meta description, then pluck the first paragraph and use it as your Meta description and title. This is better than nothing. Using popular plug-ins like SEO Yoast, which is a word press plug-in, can help you create custom templates for your metes. Smart crawl is yet another Meta description, that helps generate a Meta description itself. Have unique Meta description for all your affiliate pages. This will help you rise in SERPs and set you apart from other competitors in the market.

Sixth Mistake

Optimize your affiliate website for mobiles – Affiliate sites do not look good on mobiles and thus they should be optimized for mobile devices. This would mean that they are missing out on a large opportunity to acquire big brands in the mobile SERPs. For mobile SEO, you need to have site speed, especially when you have images. Some plug-ins that isn’t being used can help in many ways to get to your landing page from the AMP version. Affiliate sites usually have long codes and heavy images that will slow your site speed down. If you can create a faster experience for your visitors for mobile devices, they can provide value and you could also outrank them because of the red tape. Google will be switching to mobile-first indexation, and thus you should prioritize mobile optimization first.

Seventh Mistake

Free web hosting solutions usage – Avoid using free web hosting solutions including Wix and Square space, as this is not the right way to building a real website or a business of your own. They can charge TOS and even lose out of business. Owning your site content and data is the first priority as you do not have control over other elements including site design, and architecture. You should always own your site, data and content – period. Hosting solutions should be treated seriously. Spend aggressively while spending on site hosting. Never compromise your hosting solutions. Do not get yourself or your customers in trouble.

Eighth Mistake

Irrelevant backlinks – Affiliate sites need backlinks and a lot of them. They are the heart and soul of any affiliate site. They can get you in trouble with Google. They might also be considered as link schemes that may be an outdated way of acquiring backlinks and a black hat method. They will do more harm than good. All affiliate pages must add value to anyone who lands on these affiliate pages. This is the only way to avoid such a mishap from happening. Affiliate links should be hosted on sites with maximum authority. Using different SEO tools to judge the quality of your backlinks will help you identify those culprits who are devaluating your affiliate site. Your backlinks should be relevant to the industry when reaching out such sites to host affiliate links.

Ninth Mistake

Canonicals that are undefined – Usage canonical URLs will certainly assist your website rank well. This will help improve ranking and link signals for all your website content. Using canonicals will make your life easier and for your customers as well. This makes navigation easy and simple to use. Siloing your site for URL structure is one of the best practices. Clearly introduce categories within your site structure and try and communicate your categories through different URLs that customers land on when they follow the affiliate links you put up. Using canonicals is a good technique for content management on your affiliate site thus helping you with your ranking signals.

Tenth Mistake

Pretending that SEO best practices are not applicable in terms of affiliate SEO – Try not to ignore the common SEO mistakes on your affiliate sites. Issues such as 404 errors, broken links, duplicate content, and thin content and excessive 301 redirects may ruin your website. They need to be removed in order to restore harmony for your site. Use an SEO tool that will help you check your site health from time to time. This will help you remove errors that impact the crawl-ability including broken links, and other problems in content that need to be corrected.

SEO is detailed oriented work and will reap good benefits if done right. It will clean up your site internally and improve crawling of your website. It also makes navigation easier by customers and increase site speed. Affiliate SEO is no different for any merchant or any other site. Be good and true to your work to your users and Google will reward you on the SERPs. Your site is valued on what you are able to provide your customers with. Affiliate SEOs are also important as any other websites. Try and maintain your site regularly and clean-up as much as you can.

Conclusion

Impact of SEO in affiliate marketing must not be underestimated. They are equally effective, especially in the long run. PPC ads are equally a good way to entice leads to your affiliate site. Growing affiliate sites in the long run helps cultivate strong organic links. There is no stopping SEO when it comes to providing SEO for affiliate marketing websites. SEI is equally effective for affiliate websites.