Short Guide How I Build Amazon Sites These Days
- SEO |
Thought I write down my approach as it's pretty simple and easy to copy.
Nowadays you'll easily get flagged as a thin affiliate site and the easiest way for Google to detect that is by just comparing the amount of affiliate links on pages vs non monetized pages so we keep it to a minimum.
Let's say my site has 3 categories:
- flat irons
- hair dryers
- hair straighteners
I then write let's say 6 reviews for each category.
Besides the 3 categories I also write 3 comparison pages where we compare those products that we reviewed and I make a list out of it.
On each "best" list I place an equal amount of affiliate links as products, so in case of 6 products there will also be 6 affiliate links on the page.
The product reviews itself don't contain affiliate links but link to the "best" page.
The category pages have two links for each product, one links to the best page and the other one links to the product review.
Either way the visitor will always end up on the best/comparison page and those pages tend to convert very well.
Click through rates to Amazon of 50% are no exception.
So in short:
- homepage -- links to --> comparison page + product reviews
- category page -- links to --> product review + comparison page
- product review -- links to --> comparison page
- comparison page -- links to --> Amazon
Make sure to optimize your comparison page for the keywords with the most exact searches/month as due to this structure we are funneling all the link juice to that page, either direct or in a pyramid shape.
As it's a comparison page it's automatically full of LSI keywords, as brands are LSI's, model numbers are LSI's, features are LSI's and so on and you cover that all on one page naturally.
I would also suggest to make the page 1500+ words long as studies showed that those perform best.
To optimize the link juice funneling you can make use of dynamic sidebar plugins that only show products from the category where the product is featured.
I even go as far that I put the contact/disclaimer and other types of informative pages in a dynamic widget as well that only shows on the homepage and not on any other pages.
What I also did is remove the hyper link from the image on the homepage, category page and product page to increase the chance even more that they click on the "compare" button right away, normally people love to click on images but that would take them to the product review itself or to an enlarged image popup and that's one step away from our goal so we almost force them to end up on the comparison page.
One last thing that I do is make sure that the comparison pages don't have a sidebar so that the visitor doesn't get distracted by that and thus his only choice is to click on an Amazon link. I like to fool my visitor a little bit by naming the link like: "Read more reviews here", and in fact they can read more reviews at Amazon so it's not really fooling them.
When the visitor ends up on a product page or at the category page I use colored buttons with text like "compare" as people love to compare things.
The theme I use is Amazillionaire but I made a few tweaks to it. Normally that theme shows 2 buttons for each product on the category page, one meant for buy now and to insert an affiliate link and one saying something like "read more". I adjusted the theme so that only one button shows with the text "compare" and I adjusted the theme files to make that button link dofollow as the theme author made it nofollow with the intention that people insert their affiliate link there but we don't do that for the simple reason that we don't want to get flagged as a thin affiliate site and we also don't want to spend money on additional "fluff" content meant to avoid Panda issue's so we catch two flies in one here.
In the end you have a site with (let's stick to the example) 3 categories and 6 products in each category so in other words in total:
- 18 product pages
- 3 category pages
- 3 comparison pages
- 1 homepage
Total: 25 pages of which only 3 contain affiliate links, which is kind of the best ratio you can get without screwing your conversion rates and no way that you'll get hit by Panda or flagged as a thin affiliate site this way.
Last tip:
I place those 3 comparison pages in the main/menu bar next to each other and put the categories in drop down format next to that so that when someone wants to navigate somewhere else we have the highest chance they end up on a different monetized "best" page.
Almost forgot to mention the link building, let's say I build 100 links:
- 42 links to the comparison pages (14 per page)
- 24 links to the category pages (8 per page)
- 16 links to the homepage
- 18 links spread out over the reviews (1 per page)
That way the product reviews should be able to rank for long tail traffic as they get juice directly, from the homepage and from the category page, and all that flows to the comparison page as well.
Make sure to diversify your anchor text widely, especially for the homepage and category pages, this gives you some space to go more aggressive with anchors on the comparison page level.
Focus on strong links that are able to pass juice, with web2.0's, profiles, article directory, wiki, bookmark, social media links you won't get anywhere. If you plan to build such links make sure that you have a strategy in mind to drive direct traffic. Just posting at a web2.0 / wiki / article directory or anything like that without a strategy behind it will hardly bring you any traffic, if at all.
Nowadays you'll easily get flagged as a thin affiliate site and the easiest way for Google to detect that is by just comparing the amount of affiliate links on pages vs non monetized pages so we keep it to a minimum.
Let's say my site has 3 categories:
- flat irons
- hair dryers
- hair straighteners
I then write let's say 6 reviews for each category.
Besides the 3 categories I also write 3 comparison pages where we compare those products that we reviewed and I make a list out of it.
On each "best" list I place an equal amount of affiliate links as products, so in case of 6 products there will also be 6 affiliate links on the page.
The product reviews itself don't contain affiliate links but link to the "best" page.
The category pages have two links for each product, one links to the best page and the other one links to the product review.
Either way the visitor will always end up on the best/comparison page and those pages tend to convert very well.
Click through rates to Amazon of 50% are no exception.
So in short:
- homepage -- links to --> comparison page + product reviews
- category page -- links to --> product review + comparison page
- product review -- links to --> comparison page
- comparison page -- links to --> Amazon
Make sure to optimize your comparison page for the keywords with the most exact searches/month as due to this structure we are funneling all the link juice to that page, either direct or in a pyramid shape.
As it's a comparison page it's automatically full of LSI keywords, as brands are LSI's, model numbers are LSI's, features are LSI's and so on and you cover that all on one page naturally.
I would also suggest to make the page 1500+ words long as studies showed that those perform best.
To optimize the link juice funneling you can make use of dynamic sidebar plugins that only show products from the category where the product is featured.
I even go as far that I put the contact/disclaimer and other types of informative pages in a dynamic widget as well that only shows on the homepage and not on any other pages.
What I also did is remove the hyper link from the image on the homepage, category page and product page to increase the chance even more that they click on the "compare" button right away, normally people love to click on images but that would take them to the product review itself or to an enlarged image popup and that's one step away from our goal so we almost force them to end up on the comparison page.
One last thing that I do is make sure that the comparison pages don't have a sidebar so that the visitor doesn't get distracted by that and thus his only choice is to click on an Amazon link. I like to fool my visitor a little bit by naming the link like: "Read more reviews here", and in fact they can read more reviews at Amazon so it's not really fooling them.
When the visitor ends up on a product page or at the category page I use colored buttons with text like "compare" as people love to compare things.
The theme I use is Amazillionaire but I made a few tweaks to it. Normally that theme shows 2 buttons for each product on the category page, one meant for buy now and to insert an affiliate link and one saying something like "read more". I adjusted the theme so that only one button shows with the text "compare" and I adjusted the theme files to make that button link dofollow as the theme author made it nofollow with the intention that people insert their affiliate link there but we don't do that for the simple reason that we don't want to get flagged as a thin affiliate site and we also don't want to spend money on additional "fluff" content meant to avoid Panda issue's so we catch two flies in one here.
In the end you have a site with (let's stick to the example) 3 categories and 6 products in each category so in other words in total:
- 18 product pages
- 3 category pages
- 3 comparison pages
- 1 homepage
Total: 25 pages of which only 3 contain affiliate links, which is kind of the best ratio you can get without screwing your conversion rates and no way that you'll get hit by Panda or flagged as a thin affiliate site this way.
Last tip:
I place those 3 comparison pages in the main/menu bar next to each other and put the categories in drop down format next to that so that when someone wants to navigate somewhere else we have the highest chance they end up on a different monetized "best" page.
Almost forgot to mention the link building, let's say I build 100 links:
- 42 links to the comparison pages (14 per page)
- 24 links to the category pages (8 per page)
- 16 links to the homepage
- 18 links spread out over the reviews (1 per page)
That way the product reviews should be able to rank for long tail traffic as they get juice directly, from the homepage and from the category page, and all that flows to the comparison page as well.
Make sure to diversify your anchor text widely, especially for the homepage and category pages, this gives you some space to go more aggressive with anchors on the comparison page level.
Focus on strong links that are able to pass juice, with web2.0's, profiles, article directory, wiki, bookmark, social media links you won't get anywhere. If you plan to build such links make sure that you have a strategy in mind to drive direct traffic. Just posting at a web2.0 / wiki / article directory or anything like that without a strategy behind it will hardly bring you any traffic, if at all.
Dropshipping for a living.
RIP Dad Oct 14 1954 - Mar 14 2015.