How to Build Affiliate Sites and Rank High in Search Engine Results

Getting high rankings in search engines might seem like a completely impossible task. In fact, you might ask how you—a person with relatively little money and few resources—can out-compete large, well-funded corporations when it comes to search engine ranking.

Is it indeed possible at all? Or is it simply bait that shovel-sellers use to trick you into purchasing a product? “Yes, you too could rank #1 on Google in 24 hours!” We’ve all heard this line and similar ones.

I have good news for you: obtaining top rankings on Google isn’t really something you could do overnight. And that’s a good thing. Otherwise, other marketers could use the same trick to get ahead of you easily. Instead, getting top rankings on search engines is a slow, but rational, process. And the whole process starts with the creation of your affiliate site.

You might not realise this initially, but creating an affiliate site—as opposed to selling all of your own content—gives you a number of distinct advantages over people who are selling their own products. First, it allows you to quickly create an entire site around a much focused topic. Why is this important?

For one simple reason: the more narrowly focused your website is around a particular topic, the better it will rank on search engines. If, for instance, your site is a conglomeration of 35 different sales pages on totally unrelated topics, you will not rank well. If, on the other hand, your site only contains information about cranberry sauce, then you are likely to rank very well on keywords related to cranberry sauce.

Now, in addition to affirming the above (that affiliate sites can rank well in search engines), it is also important to emphasise that you should limit the scope of your site insofar as it is practical. Additionally, while you might sell products you created yourself, you should use content that you created (or hired someone else to create).

Articles scraped from directories and copied-and-pasted salesletters are duplicate content and are unlikely to help you perform better on the search engines.

However, with that said, there are a number of ways in which you can quickly generate information about affiliate products that you couldn’t do otherwise. One popular way to create content for affiliate sites is to create a “top 10 product” section, where you can include reviews on the best CB products for that particular niche.

If you haven’t actually used the products, you don’t have to claim that you did. All you have to do is summarise points in the salesletters (and explain that this is what you are doing) and paraphrase testimonials. This will allow you to give visitors the short version of the salesletter, which will count as unique content for your site.

Other ways to improve your search engine rankings include things such purchasing massive amounts of unique, focused, relevant content (i.e. articles, reports, etc.) and uploading them to your site.

For instance, you could do keyword research on your topic, find keywords that receive a lot of queries (but do not have a lot of sites returned on Google), and hire a ghostwriter at www.elance.com to create an article optimized for each.

However you decide to generate traffic for your site, keep this in mind: you cannot get a top ranking in Google overnight. It simply doesn’t happen. You can do it, but it will require work. And when you finally do get that spot—and the traffic starts rolling in—you’ll be happy that those 24-hour tricks are myth, rather than reality.