Do we have to do different work for SEO for an affiliate site than for a normal blog?

[raybiswa]

I am interested to do the SEO work for an affiliate site. Is it same as others or something particular has to be done for affiliate sites.

[dogflog]

Hi raybiswa,

Matt Cutts gave some insight on this.

I can not for the life of me, dig it up, I believe it was a video. The topic was either affiliate links or ratio of advertising to content or maybe reviews? Sorry!

The basis of the advice was the same as always great content, more content, typical stuff.

But, then he gave a little tidbit that I have found vitally important when dealing with affiliate marketing.

He made a statement that said as long as you're "giving visitors choices, you'll be fine".

I tested this, I had a pretty established page that was ranking very well and by chance it had 3 affiliate links at the bottom to 3 different partner stores.

For fun, I deleted two of them.

The page dropped SIGNIFICANTLY, I wasn't using SEOMoz tools at the time but, traffic dipped from 60-80 visits per day to less than 10.

I left it for about a month and it never regained the ranking, until, I added the two options back to the page.

It came back to previous levels within 2 weeks.

So, give visitors options, use real reviews, watch your ratio of content to aff links and that works fine for me.

Also, I have a mini site that deals with the sale of tickets. There are only a couple ticket providers available so this method works for me.

At the bottom of each event description I use a link to a single page that has links to the 3 main providers. I no index and no follow that page with the aff links. That seems to work very well and only a small percentage of click throughs seem to be lost, not having the aff links on every page is well worth the slight loss in the click through transition.

I hope this tidbit helps you out.

I also hope that you weren't asking about YOU being the sales page and having affiliates pointing links at you! If so, I completely misunderstood! And that is a totally different topic!