Recently I caught up with two of my internet marketing buddies and we had a good odd chat about SEO and planning an affiliate marketing site.

We talked about some really interesting aspects of affiliate marketing, and in this post I will be sharing with you one thing I found most helpful.

When you’re starting an affiliate website, and your intention is driving free traffic from the search engines, it’s vital that you plan the site out properly.

The most important aspect to get right is choosing the keywords that the pages of your site will target. Most of you will know what kind of keywords convert best and have a rough idea of the kind of competition you are capable of going after.

However I want to discuss another aspect of targeting keywords, that will allow you to get much more traffic in the long term, and ensure that Google loves your sites too!

OK let’s start with an example. If you have a site that sells mountain bikes, you might be targeting a particular model of bike as your keyword, such as “cell XC-1“. I haven’t checked if that phrase has any search volume, but it doesn’t matter as it’s for example purposes only.

If you were targeting “cell XC-1“, you would write an article about the bike and make sure it is monetized well and then go ahead and start getting some links to that page, so you can get top search engine rankings.

That’s nothing new to most of you I’m sure, however let me explain how you can make sure you are targeting that phrase for its true value.

When doing your keyword research look for phrases that are the longer tail version of the phrase you are targeting. Taking this example, with the phrase “cell XC-1“, I could also potentially target “cell XC-1 cross country” or “cell XC-1 cross country mountain bike” or even “buy “cell XC-1“.

As you can see in the examples above, the core phrase of “cell XC-1” is contained in all the variations of the phrase.The longer phrase variations will have less traffic, however I will explain in moment what I am getting at.

Before I continue to explain though, I first want to explain the concept of “natural looking” link building. It’s no secret that Google prefers all link building to be built naturally, which is where people just decide to link to you. However in reality, if you rely on this you’ll struggle to get top search engine rankings.

So of course, everybody builds link themselves. However that doesn’t mean that when you are building links that you shouldn’t try and mirror what natural link building looks like as closely as possible.

One way to do this is to have variation in your anchor text that makes up your links. I don’t go over board on the variation, however I think 20% of the time, if you have a slight variation in your links it’s a good idea.

Here’s the clincher, when you are adding this variation, you should use the longer version of your keyword phrase, with the original core keyword phrase embedded inside it, just like I showed in the examples above.

There are two major advantages of doing this, the first is that your links will look more natural to Google because your link anchor texts are varied, which is good for your search engine rankings, and also you’ll start to rank for these longer tail phrases eventually and get more traffic from them too!

But that’s not all, because you are still using phrases with the core keyword phrase in them, your rankings will still be boosted for that core phrase also.

I did this recently when I has starting an affiliate site, but I did it the other way around, and I went for the longer version of the phrases first, and when I got rankings for them, I then got my link builders to start building links with the shorter tail version of the keyword.

The cool thing about this was, because I had been building links on the long tail phrase that contained the exact shorter tail phrase inside it, I was already on page 2 for the shorter tail phrase anyway!

So when you are planning an affiliate site, or any site for that matter, where your intention is to drive free traffic from the search engines, it is a good idea to add variation to your links, using longer tail versions of the core keyword you are targeting for that page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the beginning of this post I mentioned that I caught up with two of my internet marketing buddies, both absolute experts at marketing online, and the great news is that one of them is giving away a free report for a limited time where he provides a detailed plan (with video) of his best affiliate marketing tricks.

I encourage you to grab it now, here’s the link: ==>Free Report<==

Enjoy!