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This is a guest post from AffiliateTips.com - a site where you can find affiliate programs to make money online.

Anyone who has an income-producing affiliate marketing website wants to optimize traffic to that site. Obviously, if people don’t visit your affiliate site, there is no possibility that a sale will be made. In order to drive people to your affiliate site, there are a lot of techniques that can be employed. One of them is link building or external search engine optimization techniques.

When someone is looking for something on the internet, they will generally go to a search engine page. Let’s use Google as an example. They will type some keywords into Google’s search engine and let Google find them some relevant websites. Will yours be one of them? Well, that depends if you’ve optimized your affiliate site for a maximum number of Google “hits,” or occasions that Google will find your site among the very first when someone types in a relevant search term.

Optimize with Relevant Links

There are many ways to optimize your affiliate website for Google hits, but one of them is to provide lots of relevant links to sources outside of your web pages. Google will generally rank sites higher when they provide lots of external links, but ONLY if those links are relevant. Google software has gotten pretty sophisticated over the years, and it will often actually penalize websites that offer dozens of unrelated links from its pages.

Not only will Google penalize websites, may it be an affiliate marketing site or not, whose external links are not relevant, but the users of your website will quickly become disenchanted with your site if every time they click on what they believe is a link that will take them to further viable information about their topic of interest, they might wind up on a totally unrelated site selling something they have absolutely no interest in. Using lots of unrelated links will lose far more customers than your affiliate marketing campaigns are trying to generate.

Links should be carefully chosen for the relevance not just to your site as a whole, but to the individual web page on which they reside. For example, one of the pages on your site may sell books relevant to the subject of your web pages. Maybe you have placed an external link on that page to the personal website of the author of one of the books you are selling. The link will provide interesting information for customers who may be interested in purchasing that particular book from you. Linking to the author’s site will give your customers something extra, and then a return link on the author’s site will send those customers back to you if they wish to purchase the book.

Placing external links should be very carefully considered. You don’t want to link to competitive sites that could actually take business away from you. You only want to link to “value added” sites where your customers can find something they can’t find on your site, such as some added information or perspectives on their subject of interest.

Always Get Something in Return

External linking should be a two-way street whenever possible. For example, you may link to someone else’s site if they return the favor and link back to yours. As in the case above, with our author, it would only be wise to link to his site if he did not offer any competing links for purchasing his book. For example, you don’t want to send people to his site, only to have him link them to Amazon to purchase his book.

All external links should be routinely updated and verified. Maybe at the time you linked to that author’s site, he did not offer an online shopping cart for his products. But a few months later, he decides to upgrade his site with those items. You don’t want to still be linking to his site if he’s going to be stealing your customers once they get there. So, make it a routine practice to check out all links every month or so to make sure they are still acceptable to your site’s overall purpose.

You also want to ensure that those links are active. Nothing is more frustrating than to link to a site that no longer exists. You don’t want to put your customers through this frustration, so respect their time by verifying any external links appearing on your site.

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