If your website offers an affiliate program, it is possible to exploit those affiliate links to the fullest and get SEO benefits in addition to referrals. Very few affiliate programs seem to be taking advantage of the potential of these affiliate links. It really surprises me, to be honest. Here are some key rules for making your affiliate program double as a SEO boost for your site.

Affiliate Link Structure- If you are using a third party service like Clickbank or Commission Junction for your affiliate program, chances are you are not getting Pagerank passed through from the affiliate sites. This is because these affiliate links typically have to go through the third-party website for tracking before landing on your site. Ideally, you want to host your own affiliate program so that you can establish a very “clean” affiliate link format.

By far the best way to ensure that Pagerank is passed through your affiliate links is to have your affiliates link to you directly without any sort of tracking code or bounce pages. The commissions can be tracked through the referrer information. This type of link is nearly impossible for the search engines to identify as an affiliate link which will practically guarantee that link-juice will be passed through the link.

Another benefit to using direct linking is that your affiliates won’t feel the need to mask the links which will provide more natural looking links to their viewers. The best example of this type of affiliate linking structure that I can think of is Best of The Web’s Affiliate program.

There are several downsides to using this type of affiliate tracking, of course. One major issue is that it is much more difficult to track referrals beyond one session. If you would like to give affiliate commissions for sales made within a week of the referral, you would have to use some sort of IP tracking or a cookie that is placed when the user visits your site. There are also several potential cons to hosting and managing your own affiliate program, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Another key way that you can take advantage of your affiliate program is to carefully craft your pre-made affiliate ads and links. Use your targeted keywords in the anchor text of the affiliate links that you provide to affiliates. While not all affiliates will use the suggested link, many will. For banner ads, you can make clever use of the <noscript> tag to feed the search engines links with the appropriate alt text.

By using your affiliate campaigns as an additional SEO strategy, you will be amazed at how quickly the backlinks to your site can build up. These will not only improve your ability to bring customers to your site, but will also help quality affiliates find your program.