How do I structure my articles for affiliate marketing?

When the medium is a website, in order to generate targeted traffic for advertisers, it's important to write articles that are relevant in the eyes of search engines. Let's take a look at how to structure your articles to improve their ranking on the Internet.

What are the best copywriting techniques for improving SEO and generating traffic?

To generate traffic to your website, it's important to understand how search engines work. Google and Bing crawlers, for example, constantly crawl the web to index sites and judge the quality of their content. Depending on the results, your site will appear more or less prominently in the search results pages. This is known as"natural referencing". To be well referenced and generate traffic, it's crucial to pay particular attention to the content of your site, both in terms of form and content.

The analysis of your articles involves examining the text you write, according to the following criteria:

• The main keyword, on which you're trying to position yourself, which is usually a query like "Testing the iPhone 14" or "How do I choose a VPN?".
• Article length: the longer the better, but be careful not to embroider unnecessarily. For a long time, 300 words was the preferred length, but nowadays 500 words is the norm. Many of the most highly referenced pages on the web have grown in length over the years, to exceed 2,000 words or 12,000 characters (in French, a word measures an average of 6 characters, i.e. 6 signs; the signs in a text are understood to include "spaces").
• It's important to have a clear structure for the article, with sections and sub-sections, as well as paragraphs, and to use the appropriate HTML tags.
• Writing style is also important, with a focus on neat spelling and short sentences. A simple rule: subject + verb + complement. It's reductive, but effective. It's also advisable to highlight key words by putting them in bold, especially the key phrase.
• Exclusivity and usefulness: the search engine and the reader are looking for relevant and, ideally, exclusive information. Always remember to provide your readers with all the answers, and to teach them at least ONE thing. If you report the same things as everyone else, and even later, you won't rank well on Google.
• Your relevance to the subject: you'll generally get more audience and reader trust by talking about the same subject 10 times from different angles than by publishing 10 articles on unrelated subjects. Google favors subject experts. Writing repeatedly on a theme is like "working clusters".

HTML structure is also crucial to the form of the article. There are specific tags that can be used to improve the article's referencing on the web:

• The title tag is the title of the article, and must not exceed 65 characters. For example: "How to get rid of Asian hornets" (45 characters).
• The desc tag provides a more detailed description of the article's content, and should be between 120 and 155 characters long. For example: "Getting rid of Asian hornets: testing different traps and step-by-step tips for making effective traps at a lower cost" (140 characters).
• h tags are title and section tags that represent the article hierarchy. For more information, see this page on the Mozilla site.
• Image metadata is also important. It is essential to fill in the alt tag of images to facilitate the work of SEO robots.
• Finally, internal linking is a key element of SEO. The presence of relevant links in the article to other pages on your website or blog helps to improve its ranking on the Internet.

💡 In general, it's recommended to place the article keyword in the title, desc and h1 tags.

If you use Wordpress, the use of plugins can be a real asset in improving your SEO. Extensions such as Yoast SEO, The SEO Framework or SEOPRess are easy to install. They allow you to check that key points of structuring and readability for search engines are respected.

How can I optimize my article to generate affiliate income?

There are a number of best practices for optimizing your articles to generate affiliate income. First of all, it's important to be honest with your readers, providing them with clear and comprehensive information about the products you're promoting. This will enable them to make an informed choice among the various products that meet their needs.

Secondly, you need to optimize your CTAs to generate traffic to your partners' websites. There are various techniques you can use to entice your visitors to click on your affiliate links, such as using buttons, which are more visible than simple text-based affiliate links, or offering price comparison tables. To find out more about this aspect of affiliate marketing, read our article on optimizing CTAs in affiliate marketing.

Finally, don't hesitate to add boxes at the bottom of your articles to explain what an affiliate link is. Your audience will appreciate your transparency. NB: if you're using Affilizz's price tables, this information is already included automatically, so there's no need to add another box.