Affiliate programs are fast becoming a solid component of a company’s SEO strategy. Affiliate programs used to be mostly about channeling traffic and giving credit to affiliates that generated any leads or sales. All most all of these services used a redirect on affiliate links to keep track of the process, which was fine, but links with redirects through a second party never gave backlinks to the advertiser’s site. Now things have changed. There are affiliate programs being created that can keep track of leads and orders and give a hard backlink to the advertiser.

Directtrack and Fusion Quest both offer affiliate tracking and hard backlinks on affiliate links. This means every time an affiliate places a banner or text link they are giving a hard, one-way link back to the advertiser. If you’re an advertiser or a company running an affiliate program you’d better take note. Either you get on board, or your competition is going to blow you away on organic listings.

SEO companies are going to need to add another arrow to their quiver if they want to succeed in search as well. On the bright side you can kill two birds with one stone; you can channel more traffic for leads and sales, and build your one way backlinks.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Ecommerce, Link Popularity, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.