If you want to rank well for your keywords that are used to advertised your selected affiliate product, you need to know a bit about successful link building.

You can obtain top rankings for even very difficult to obtain keywords like ‘make money online’, ‘search engine optimization’ and others, if you only know how. You need to learn to differentiate between the useful information that will boost your rankings and all the crappy time wasters out there, it is as simple as that.

Although SEO is a bit more than just link building, this is a very crucial part of any SEO work on an affiliate site. Having a good ranking means that prospects who type in Google your keywords will find you faster than your competitors, which means they will click on your links, which means they will get to your site, where you will then successfully be able to sell your affiliate product.

There are two types of linking strategies: manual linking and natural linking.

Manual linking is due to your own efforts with other webmasters to get them to link to your sites. It means that you actually had to do something with it, you requested these links.

Natural linking means others link to you because they liked your information, or site, they liked what you are selling, or for any other reasons that do not involved you begging for these links.

Of course, manual linking is much easier than natural linking, since the second is much more difficult to achieve in the first place!

To really rank well for your main keywords in Google (and not only there), you need to artfully apply both types of linking strategies for your site. You need to know how to apply the manual linking, but also how to get those natural links coming your way – and yes, although seemingly impossible, there is a way to get them linking to you without you overtly having anything to do with it!

Josh Spaulding’s Ultimate Link Building Report shows exactly how to achieve this, and much more. For example, it will show you how to achieve 1, 2 and 3 ways links. It will explain you what ‘link baits’ are and demonstrate to you how to guarantee backlinks with them. It will describe you what authority stoppers are and why a Google PR is important (and why it isn’t).

For example, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot already about ‘nofollow’ links. But did  you know that MANY sites are using it these days as a tool to regulate the authority from within their site and it’s best to use a tool like Search Status to highlight these nofollow links, so you know to not waste your times with them? This is only one of the gems Josh is detailing in his TULBR (as he likes to shorten it). Get it now,  you’ll learn lots about SEO and link building for your affiliate marketing site, since, afterall, being on Google’s first page and possibly above the fold (i.e. among the top 5 in the SERPS) is what makes an affiliate become a great affiliate and visible to thousands of people searching for a cure or for your product online!

Before we go into how to (ethically) spy on your competition, you first need to know why would you need these Sherlock Holmes skills in the first place. Why do you need to spy on your competition?

Well, to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to rank well for your keywords for one. Spying on your competition allows you to see why your competitors rank better for certain keywords than you. Why they have a higher PR than you. Why they get more traffic than you. Why they do overall better than you – and how to fix that.

Now that you know why would you want to use the spying techniques, let’s see what all will you achieve by doing this.

You will be able to…

• find the ‘top dogs’ in your niche and what they website URL is
• find your top x keywords that you aren’t using but you should be!
• finding where these top dogs are getting their backlinks and getting some of that for yourself!
• grab some of those top positions as well!

Question is, do we have tools good enough to offer us all of these so we can beat the competition? The answer is: yes, we have! And the good news is, although some have to be purchased, others are for free and you can do all your analysis with the main 3 tools I’m going to describe you here:

The easiest tool of all, of course, is Google.com (or your language equivalent of it). All you need is type in your keywords with ‘exact match’ (in “text”) and you will get on the first page the main competitors for those keywords.

So getting that was quite easy right?

Now on to the next step, finding the top keywords they are using. One of the best – and free – ways to do it is by using the Google Keyword Tool . The only difference is that instead of keywords, you will select here ‘website content’ and then grab the first link from your Google search result and enter the URL there. Now you will see the main keywords that competitor is using. Write them down, and then go on to the next. Rinse and repeat.

Next step is finding the backlinks to their site. Good news is, this tool is also free: the Yahoo Site Explorer. Go to the site, enter your competitor URL and press Explore URL. You will not only see how many pages they are indexed but also who is linking to them! Pretty powerful stuff if you ask me.

Technically all you need to get started are really these 3 free tools. Most of the times this is what I am using.

If I want to make a heaver market research though, I will grab one of the paid tools that really pays for itself 100 times over: SpyFu.com . This website has some free features as well, which I use a lot, but sometimes they are not enough and you might have to resort to buy it in full to unlock its full power.

What is SEO anyway? Most newbies have hears about SEO, but are afraid to ask.

Search engine optimization is the art bringing your site to rank well in search engines (particularly Google) so that when people are searching for the keywords your site is optimized for, they will find it in the SERPS (search engine result pages). Yes, it takes months, if not years, for a site to rank well for the keywords you are trying to optimize your site, so don’t get discouraged if next month you’re still not on page 1. You really need to be patient. Let’s covers some important SEO tips for you.

Make your proper Keyword Research

You need to choose a range of long tail (variations of a main word) and other related keywords, so that when somebody is searching for them, you will be found. Nobody really searches for ‘acne’, but they definitely search for ‘acne natural treatments’. Some topics have a range of keywords that relate to them so you really need to cover them all, including choosing synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning), plurals and other words that people may use to find your site. The more the merrier, I say!

Tracking and Statistics

How can you improve something something if you don’t know what you need to improve. So sign up with Google Analytics and get used to using it on a regular basis. You can also use Awstats in your hosting Cpanel to track where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they are finding your site with and where they are leaving from. I’m using Awstats quite a lot actually.

Emphasize some keywords

You can emphasize certain keywords in your articles and blog posts by making them bold and italics, and also making them headers with the H1, H2 etc tags. This will tell the search engines that these are important words and should be counted as such.

Of course, there are much more than these 3, but these SEO tips should get you started on the right track to SEO your success.