Your affiliate website needs maintenance and be sure to be equipped with every “tool” needed! The moment the website goes life, it has what we call seed content no matter how you feel complete the content is.
There is always that room for growth by updating the content, increasing the content on your affiliate marketing websites, etc. But you do not increase it anyhow!
Maintaining an affiliate website is a skill and also requires techniques. You need diagnostic tools, tracking tools, etc.
Any website’s position or ranking in search engines will fluctuate up and down and may rise up depending on what actions are taken to improve the rankings. Also what we need to accept is that affiliate marketing websites can loose their favorable positions based on many factors. But a website that is not maintained will inevitably loose its good rankings. Before looking at how to maintain your website, let us quickly look at what can make it loose its rankings.
To know how to make an affiliate website for free read here…
What Makes A Website Loose Rankings
A website (or webpage) can loose rankings because of several reasons even when it is well maintained… but that should not be the reason not to maintain it because if it falls, the fall will be temporary. And when it is not maintained the fall will be permanent. A website can fall because of some of the reasons below;
Low Or No Maintenance
It is not enough only to know how to build an affiliate website using WordPress, you also need to know how to maintain it by developing other skills.
No Content Updates
If the content on the website stays too long without being updated… too long here is relative because it depends on the type of niche chosen. The frequency at which content needs to be updated in a trending niche is higher than that of a seasonal niche. In the same token the frequency at which content needs to be changed in an evergreen niche is lower than that of a seasonal seasonal niche.
At the same time some content becomes obsolete with time and might need to be re-purposed to play a different role from before. An example of content becoming obsolete is content that was promoting a product that is no longer in the market. In affiliate marketing and when you join certain affiliate programs you will notice that some products go out of stock, get obsolete, discontinued, etc. So depending on which affiliate program you join be aware that this can happen.
When this happens the content may be updated to indicate that the product is no longer on the market and re-purpose it as a hub for links to strengthen internal linking. It may be deleted but it is not recommended because it might produce dead links in other existing content. And this can harm you optimization efforts.
No New Content
From time to time you will need to add completely new content to be afloat with the times. This is another form content update but this time content is not added to existing content but a new webpage is created. A new webpage means new linking opportunities to strengthen the internal structure of the website, it also means new keywords that might improve relevancy of the site in the niche.
An example can be adding an informative article on say “Products Under $50” and then you list all the products on the site that are under $50 and link back to them from this page. And then you go into each product post and link back to this newly created page. Now here we have a new keyword i.e. “Products Under $50” (an new related keywords to this keyword) and a number of links coming in and going out to other posts.
Tweaking Of Existing Content
Existing content can be tweaked in several ways including updating that is discussed above. Another way to tweak content is to add a completely new section in the existing content so that it may be more relevant to what visitors are looking for.
Search Engine Algorithm Changes
The search engines may alter their algorithm so significantly that it may negatively affect your rankings. Such have happened below with Google… there Panda, Penguin, etc… and in my early days going online I remember there was an update that affected EzineArticles so badly.
Below is an example of one of our websites that was recently affected by change in Google algorithm… from the graph you can also pick that there has been 2 other times it was affected. On the third time it has not yet recovered because after the incident we did not update or make any changes unlike the previous 2 instances.
So to avoid this permanent dropping in positions such that your website is nowhere to be seen one of the ways is to update content, add new fresh content, improve internal link building. One other thing that is critical is to follow white hat SEO practices. Black SEO can really hurt your site!
Poor or Weak Linking Structure
Poor or weak linking structure will also affect your rankings. The linking structure becomes weakened when you delete certain pages that were linked to and from or when you change the URL. Also the search engines might de-index some of your pages thus weakening the structure and cause a drop in rankings.
When you maintain or keep an eye on your website you can pick these potential problems up before they can have any devastating effects on the website.
A Better Optimized Website As Competition
Remember that when you were creating and developing your affiliate website there were other affiliate websites in the same niche and when your site went live it took up some of your competitors positions causing them to drop. In the same way one of the competitors might have gone out to improve their site or a new kid is on the blog so to speak.
So watch out for that by keeping an eye on your website.
How To Maintain An Affiliate Website
Maintaining an affiliate website is not such a taunting task if you take advantage of diagnostic or tracking tools like Goggle Console Google Analytics, etc. Use data from these tools as feedback to audit your website, to improve and update your website.