Affiliates Should Optimize Their Sites

While many affiliates use pay-per-click campaigns to bring traffic to their sites and make affiliate sales, they shouldn't undermine the power of organic traffic, even if it takes longer to build than advertising.

Optimizing your site to get traffic from the big 3 - Google, Yahoo and MSN -- is not only free but, in the long-term, it might become a more constant and cost-effective source of traffic than pay-per-click, which costs keep rising.

Because it provides the biggest chunk of search engine traffic, your optimization should focus on Google, with the advantage that most optimization tweaks will translate to Yahoo and MSN as well.

If your site's main activity is to make affiliate sales, it should get optimized for visitors that are predisposed to buy the affiliate services and/or products you offer on your site.

The best way to do this is to find appropriate keywords, which can be done by either using keyword tools – Google and Nichebot offer some great tools for free – or by checking what keywords other sites in the same industry use.

Once you have a list of good keywords, you can not only add them to title and keyword tags on your pages but also use them to find ideas for new pages that might attract additional traffic. Articles that include those keywords without sounding phony are often more effective than home pages, because they attract highly targeted traffic and, as a result, convert sales better.

Once your site is optimized, make sure to submit it manually to Google. You can then use a search engine submission software to submit your site to the other hundreds of minor search engines and directories that populate the web, but which traffic might still bring you qualified leads.