Affiliation and SEO: how to optimize your content for search engines

If you don't follow the rules laid down by these engines, you may write excellent content, but your website or blog will remain poorly referenced, and therefore invisible to Internet users. So, in addition to the importance of having a high-performance affiliate website, it's crucial to master the rules of SEO optimization. Let's take a closer look!

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, encompasses all techniques aimed at improving your site's positioning in the search engine results pages. It complements SEA, or Search Engine Advertising, which involves buying keywords in search results. With its bidding system, SEA can quickly prove costly, especially as it delivers immediate but ephemeral results.

SEO, on the other hand, is about investing human time to attract naturally qualified and sustainable traffic to a website.

How do search engines determine the position of different websites in a user's search results? They send robots, called crawlers, to crawl your site. These robots read the textual content of your site and analyze it.

SEO encompasses a mix of technical and editorial parameters aimed at making your content readable and optimized for robots.

The cornerstone of SEO lies in the judicious use of keywords, and the technical optimization of your website (loading time, responsive content, etc.). responsiveimage size, caching)... We've dedicated an entire article to web performance, so we'll concentrate on editorial techniques in this article.

Before creating optimized content, the first step is to determine the keywords you want to rank for.

To do this, you can use tools such as SemRush, Ahrefs or Moz. Evaluate the potential of the keywords you're considering in relation to the number of monthly requests and the competition for each keyword, and analyze your competitors' sites to build up a list of keywords with high traffic potential.

Once you've drawn up this list, plan your article writing around the themes you're most familiar with, and which offer a high conversion potential.

Creating quality content for affiliate SEO

For your content to be perfectly optimized for affiliation, it must meet two essential criteria:

• They must bring real value to your readers.
• They must be written according to SEO rules.

Let's focus first on the value you deliver. Your content must be informative and useful. An article, for example, that simply lists the functionalities and technical features of a product, reiterating the manufacturer's information, has very little chance of attracting traffic and converting. To guide your articles, focus on the value proposition, on what differentiates the product from its competitors, and give your opinion.

In addition to the quality of the information contained in the article, there are a number of rules to follow when writing it:

• Content should have a clear structure, with an introduction, paragraphs and a conclusion. To help search engine spiders understand this organization, use headings and sub-headings. In HTML, the hierarchy of H tags indicates structure, with H1 for the title, H2 for section headings, etc.
• Keywords must be integrated judiciously. They should appear in strategic places, notably in H1 titles, H2 subheadings, paragraphs and image ALT tags. However, avoid over-optimization, as excessive use of a keyword can send a negative signal to robots.
• Images should be optimized for fast loading. Plugins such as ShortPixel or TinyPNG for Wordpress optimize image compression, thus avoiding increasing the loading time of your pages.

Internal links and backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites to your content. The more backlinks your website has, the more referential your articles are, which means they are considered authoritative in the eyes of search engines and will therefore rank higher in search results. The size of the site (PageRank) linking to yours is also an important factor.

Obtaining backlinks is a time-consuming task, and using your network is highly recommended. You can try contacting publishers of complementary sites to offer to "exchange" links, or even propose partnerships.

Guest-blogging is also a common practice, whereby you write an article for a site in exchange for a quality link, while your partner gets quality content in return, creating a win-win situation.

Last but not least, one way to get lots of backlinks is to syndicate your RSS feed, allowing all your new articles to be relayed to other sites.

💡A backlink must be of high quality. If your site is about cooking, getting backlinks from sites about aquaristics or investing will bring little credibility to your content.

Internal links in your articles are links to other pages on your site. There are two types of internal links:

• Those used to navigate through your site's structure, for example links on your home page to your category pages.
• Those inserted in the text of your articles, which link, for example, to a complementary article, to the previous version of the product you're talking about, or to an article dedicated to a competitor's product.

💡 Your internal links should make it easier for your audience to navigate your site, and add value for readers by referring them to articles relevant to the one they're browsing. So use sparingly, and make sure you regularly check that your links aren't broken.

Measuring the impact of your strategy

As with audience measurement, SEO performance measurement has its own tools. These online services inspect your site from top to bottom to extract the key performance indicators (KPIs) needed to monitor your SEO actions. Sites such as SemRush, Ahrefs and Moz offer these services.

Using these tools, you get an SEO audit of your site that provides essential information about your domain:

• Authority score
• Number of backlinks
• The list of keywords for which your site is well positioned organically
• The quality of your content

These sites also allow you to compare the features of two sites by placing them side by side.

Once you've got the information you need, it's time to move on to analysis:

• What keywords and themes have you tried to position yourself on?
• Are your articles well positioned and what is their SEO quality score?
• Is your number of backlinks increasing?

The answers to these questions should enable you to draw up a list of actions to improve your SEO. These actions can be corrections to improve some of your existing articles, but also reinforcement actions:

• Writing new articles on specific topics
• Development of new related themes
• Improve page load times

This process is continuous and requires constant iteration to achieve long-term results.