Quick Intro to the World of SEO, Affiliate Marketing, and Amazon S3

This is the shortest summary I could think of to help you can understand a little more about this fun discovery.

The world of trying to share coupons with you online is one of the single most competitive areas of SEO (search engine optimization… aka, getting search engines like Google to list your website higher in the search results then than other people’s websites). Other extremely competitive SEO areas are industries like insurance, loans, and real estate.

Thousands of websites try to outrank each other on Google to make sure they are the #1 result when you type in “wallgreens coupon code”.

Since most of the coupons you find on these pages don’t work, you may have wondered why do these coupon sites even exist? Their primary goal has been and will always remain to attach a browser cookie to your web browser (Chrome, Safari, etc…) so they can get a commission on anything you buy from that retailer. This is called affiliate marketing. The cookie contains information that let’s the retailer know that which coupon website sent you and reward them with a commission. These commissions typically range from 1% to 15% of your total shopping cart, but they vary greatly from one retailer to another.

Just in case you wondered why the coupon code is always hidden and requires you to “click” to view it; that’s so they can open a new browser tab (normally in the background) that launches the retailer’s website (like wallgreens.com) and adds their affiliate marketing cookie to your browser and then rewards them for any purchase you make. Even if the code doesn’t work (which it normally doesn’t), if you still checkout and buy something, you have just provided them with a nice commision. Yay!

BTW: The web browser extensions you use to auto-apply coupons at checkout do the same thing.

Now you know how the world of coupon based affiliate marketing works.

As for Amazon S3, it’s nothing more than cheap file storage and hosting for files. Really boring old-school stuff, but super useful and extremely popular among web developers everywhere. You upload a file and Amazon S3 serves that file up to people all around the world (think… images, videos, mp3s, PDFs, documents of all kinds, etc…).

Anyway, back to the Amazon S3 SEO hack that a very clever affiliate marketer figured out.

(Almost) Nothing Can Outrank Amazon

Amazon.com employs one of the best SEO teams in the world. Some of the best minds in the search marketing industry spend all day trying to figure out how Amazon can outrank every other website (including many times the actual manufacturer’s website) for any product. Whether it’s a turtleneck sweater or a new Weber grill, Amazon wants to rank #1 when you search for it.

Amazon.com has such an amazing power to rank for anything (known in the industry as Domain Authority), that even the other websites they own and link to (like amazonaws.com) have built up incredible Domain Authority of their own.