World Wide Web Minds
SEO and Internet Marketing

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.

The first thing that a webmaster wants to happen after he had his website set up is getting the site indexed in Google and increase its rankings. The official Google Webmaster Central blog gives some tips on this:

1. Be an authority on the subject. If users find your site useful and of good quality, they will most likely link to your site.
2. Submit your content to Google and update it on a frequent basis. Use Google webmaster tools to help you get your site crawled.
3. Don’t engage in link exchange schemes. Google Webmasters Guidelines clearly address this issue under “Quality Guidelines – basic principles”.
4. Avoid pure affiliations. Make sure you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that a user can’t find anywhere else like product reviews and ratings and not just pure affiliations.

These tips are posted for Portuguese webmasters but are general principles for all. If you are looking to b a straight up SEO and webmaster, following these tips is the way to go.

Learn useful stuff on how to make your way to the top of search engines. Read about the latest internet marketing news, interesting webmaster tools and keep updated with the current trends in the world wide web.