Tuesday, January 22, 2008

How Affiliates Can Affect Your SEO

An affiliate can link to a merchant site in a number of ways. Common types of links include text links (a piece of text hyperlinked to a URL, a banner link (boxes that contain words and graphics), search boxes and graphic or photographic links.

The text links are great for SEO especially if you enhance them with keywords. Pictures and graphics are okay if there is not too many of them. A search engine spider could read them as blank space and then categorize your website as being unfinished. There is one way in which pictures and graphics can work for you and that is if you add photo captions that are optimized with pictures beneath them.

Banner links can actually sabotage your SEO efforts especially if they are the blinking kind that uses some kind of primitive flash. The spiders read that as a blank space as well and may categorize your website as being unfinished and rank it low.

An affiliate can also link to you through your home page, through a product specific link as is in tail linking or directly to a storefront. Obviously the more affiliates you have the more opportunity you will have to virally spread your keywords to wherever else your affiliates may choose to put their links in their efforts to make money.

If you want to promote your own busienss then avoid affiliate programs that are cobranded. some affiliate programs, affiliates can maintain their Web site identity even after a customer links to the merchant Web site. The merchant Web site will handle all the sales, and will usually host the page, but will configure the page so that it appears as though it's still part of the affiliate Web site (Unless the user examines the URL displayed by his browser, he probably won't even know he has linked to another site.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Anthony_Gregory