The 8 Most Forgotten SEO Tips
For Your Amazon Affiliate Website

For most Amazon affiliates organic traffic through search engine optimisation is their main traffic source but you wouldn't believe how many Amazon affiliate websites are just smashing out content and building expensive backlinks to it without really taking care of their on-page SEO.

Sure they might do the basics such as main keywords in the content, title and description tags and even H1 tags but they miss out on so many other incredibly important areas of SEO.

Let's take a look at 6 of the most forgotten on-page SEO aspects that can help push your Amazon website past your competitors and get a torrent of organic high converting traffic to your website.

#1 ALT tags on images

It's no secret Google loves media rich websites and although its pretty smart these days at knowing what a picture contains its not perfect. So when you do add images to your website always make sure you add alt tags on the images that contain a keyword rich description of what the image is so Google can understand it fully.

The other advantage of this is from a disability point of view screen readers will be able to understand of image also. With new disability laws coming into place all the time is it crazy to think Google might even start giving more weight to websites that are more screen reader friendly?

#2 Page speed

It's common knowledge that page speed is now a Google ranking factor. However often webmasters pack their website full of huge high resolution images that take a lifetime to load. They also install million of WordPress plugins that increase the time it takes for your WordPress install to actually start sending HTML+CSS from the web server.

Another common problem is they don't minify the CSS and JavaScript and even worse they often pack it with ads too! Here is a simple list of quick tips you can use to speed up your WordPress (and even most non-wordpress) websites so Google loves sending traffic to them.

• Uninstall slow WordPress plugins - Go through your WordPress plugins one by one uninstalling them then testing your servers response time and webpages load time until you find out the plugins that are slowing down the website the most and ask yourself if you really need them or can you find quicker alternatives
  
  
• Use a CDN - A content delivery network such as Cloud Flare will cache your web assets (that's just a fancy way of saying HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript) on their lightning quick servers based all over the world so your website loads blazingly fast. Most offer a free plan and most also include a free SSL certificate that they renew automatically on their servers so it never runs out on you.
  
  
• Minify CSS and Javascript - When CSS and JavaScript are created by web developers they name parts of it (variables) with long descriptive names such as "variable_that_contains_page_width" that is great when developing because its easy to know what it does but when the code is live and out of your website you don't need to know what a variable does as long as it works. So it can be called something a fraction of the size such as "a2". A website will contain thousands of these variables so when you shrink them down your websites size can be reduced dramatically. There are WordPress plugins that can do this for you and some content delivery networks will even automatically do this for you.
  
  
• Optimise images - Often webmasters buy or take huge high resolution images then only show them on their website in a small area of the page so they could have their resolution reduced greatly and the user wouldn't even know. Images with smaller resolutions will be much smaller so load much faster.
  
  
• Avoid cheap slow hosting - Cheap hosting might sound great at first but the server are often over provisioned (too many websites on each server) so they can't handle the load properly and as a result of this server up your website very slowly. Again a CDN would help with this or you could just move to faster better quality hosting.
  
  
• AMP - AMP was originally used only by new media outlets however its now catching on to other websites because people are seeming ranking improvements when switching to AMP webpages. AMP is a way of almost instantly loading a webpage but it requires you to make the page AMP compatible first, there are some WordPress plugins that will do this for you automatically though.
  
  
• GZIP server compression - If you have access to your webservers settings make sure GZIP compression is enabled. GZIP compression takes your websites content (HTML + CSS + JavaScript + Images) and compresses it all with GZIP then sends it to the users browser which then decompresses it and displays it. This can dramatically speed up a website, especially if its a large content rich article.
  
  
• Tweak - Remember to try each change one at a time and keep tweaking away writing down any gains or losses until you have hit the best page load time possible.
  
  

#3 LSI's

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are conceptually related terms that search engines use to deeply understand a piece of content. These are NOT simply long tail variants of your keywords.

If your webpage was about "cold brew coffee" then a long tail variant of this keyword would be "cold brew coffee machines".

However a LSI keyword would be "filter", "temperature", "grind", "cold water", and "ice". They are keywords Google is expecting to see on your article. Keywords its learnt from looking at other bits of content about "cold brew coffee" from around the web. So if you don't include these LSI keywords then you are making it harder for Google to be sure it knows what your content is about.

The beauty of LSI keywords is that you don't have to write for a machine anymore (Google), in the old days you used to have to repeat "cold brew coffee" again and again to get your keyword density to a point where Google was sure what your webpage was about. Now you just write like you wre writing for a human.

#4 Internal linking

Many Amazon affiliate website owners don't fully understand how PageRank works. Some will even say "PageRank is dead!" that's simply not true, its just not made publicly available now. PageRank still flows both externally to other websites and internally.

The understanding internal PageRank flow is a must most of your PageRank (or link juice as its also known) flows into your homepage where most of your external backlinks will probably point to. From there it will flow to the pages being linked to from your homepage. These pages will rank well because they have plenty of link juice flowing from the home page. Those pages will link to other pages and a little bit more of the link juice will flow around.

Now you understand how PageRank (link juice) flows around a website internally you can begin to understand the importance of internal linking. If you have two blog posts one about "strong cheese" and the other about "cheese storage" and you link to one from the other with a link with the anchor text of "cheese storage" you are forcing some link juice through from one page to another and helping Google understand what the page is about with that anchor text.

Using this little SEO trick you can link from your informational pages through to your buyer pages forcing link juice through with keyword rich anchor texts, and this will really help your rankings.

#5 Site structure

If you are using WordPress you don't really have to worry about this too much as most templates are normally pretty SEO structure friendly but you should always make sure Google can understand your websites structure.

The most basic form of this is making sure Google can see and understand the links to other webpages and they have correct/relevant anchor text in the structure links.

A good example of this is "Siloing". Siloing for search engine optimisation is a rather advanced topic but the basic concept of it is that your website is efficiently organised into highly relevant subcategories so a car category would link through to a classic car category or a sports car category and so on.

This site structure helps Google greatly with page relevancy. Here is a more in-depth article https://www.bruceclay.com/seo/silo/.

#6 Testing on different devices and browsers

So you think your website is mobile friendly because you pulled out your brand new iPhone and it looks great? Think again.

Once your Amazon affiliate website gets popular you're going to have many difference sized devices from tablets to screen readers, with many different browsers from Edge to Firefox.

If you are a huge Chrome lover and you haven't tested your website in Firefox you might find you are losing out on 10% of your traffic because your website doesn't render properly for Firefox users and they're closing it instantly.

Whats this behaviour going to do to your website's bounce rate and dwell time? And what will those signals say to Google if they are used to evaluate your website?

Test every resolution you can, test every operating system you can, test every browser you can and even test with every popular browser extension you can. You might find a critical part of your website is being blocked by AdBlockers! Its happened before.

#7 User experience

Many people believe Google is increasingly looking at on site user behaviour as a ranking factor. These on site metrics could be bounce rate (how many people load the site then quickly leave) and could also be dwell time (how long they stay for).

Even if you don't think Google is using these metrics then you can't argue a good looking, well designed, easy to use websites isn't more likely to attract more backlinks than an ugly, hard to read, hard to navigate website with the same content?

It's not hard to make a website that provides a decent user experience. Here are a few quick tips.

• Font - Make sure you use an easy to read font, its incredibly painful to read a long article when the font is fighting against you
  
  
• Font size - Users love large fonts. If you are targeting an older audience and you have a small font they'll simply close your website
  
  
• Break up content - Users hate looking at a large blocks of text, it looks like a challenge to read that they can normally do without. Break up content into small chunks of a few lines.
  
  
• Use headers - Headers allow users to skin read content. While long form content is great some people simply don't have the time or patience for it. Frequent headers allow skimming and quick reading.
  
  
• Summary / TLDR - Again some people just want an answer to a quest and don't really care about the who what or whys. If possible provide a summary at the end they can skip to or a TLDR (too long didnt read)
  
  

#8 Comment system for fresh content

Webpages that have their content regularly updated tend to rank well on Google. One easy way of doing this is to simply install a comment system on all your websites pages and encourage users to comment with bait lines such as:

• We'd love to hear your thoughts?
  
• Think we're wrong? Tell us why below!
  
• Drop your opinion below and we'll share ours right back at you!
  

Comment systems are great because your webpage's content gets regularly updated, grows in size and gets free LSI's and related keywords you might not of thought of all on autopilot. Just make sure you get one that manages all the comment spam for you.