Quality back links to your site are paramount.

Basically, the more you can get, the greater the odds are that it will benefit from streams of free targeted, organic traffic.

To get your back links there are many mainstream approaches, using an affiliate program for link building, however, is pretty well much unknown.

To demonstrate this concept at work, let’s take a look together at the screen shot below.





You’ll see that we’ve entered “linkdomain:mycycling.com -site:mycycling.com” into Yahoo! search.

“Hottest Day of the Year Ride” shows on the SERP.

When we click through on “Hottest Day of the Year Ride”, here’s what we get.





You can see the MyCycling.com affiliate banner (above right) that is creating the back link in this scenario.

You can imagine what this strategy could do for your rankings if you’ve got hundreds of affiliates scattering your banners and text ads all around their sites.

Here’s the most important part of this post so mark it well.

Your affiliate links must be 301 Redirect enabled (permanently moved) for the back links to qualify.

So who is 301 enabled and who’s not? I’ll get to that in a sec.

If you’re thinking about setting up an affiliate program there are two ways of going about it.

One, use a network or two, track using your own independent (indie) program.

There are pros and cons either way but let’s have at some of the leaders and I’ll also give you a bit of a run down on who’s 301 Redirect enabled and who’s not (you can perform a small hack with some platforms to get the 301s working).



Networks

Hosted
1. Commission Junction - YES
2. ClickBank - YES
3. LinkShare - NO
4. PayDotCom - YES
5. ShareASale - Unusual redirection - Probably not SEO friendly
7. LinkConnector - YES
8. Google - NO

Host your own
1. 1ShoppingCart - NO
2. InfusionSoft - YES
3. AffTrack - NO
4. Post Affiliate Pro 4 (PAP4) - YES
5. iDevAffiliate - YES On the more expensive option
6. ClickInc - YES
7. TrackAssure - NO

If your preferred affiliate network or host your own software is not listed above, don’t sweat it. There’s a "you beaut" tool that you can throw your affiliate links into to find the verdict.

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers





Allow me to point out that if you have an affiliate program remember to submit it for a listing in our Affiliate Program Directory.

There are other directories around too but just not as good as this one. :)

So there you have it. Provided that your affiliate program is 301 Redirect enabled it’s ready to rock as a powerful link building tool.

What an awesome way to amass a large number of quality back links organically and very quickly.

If you have an affiliate program or if you’re thinking of hooking one up, remember to choose one that’s 301 Redirect enabled.

Affiliate marketing keeps getting better. Beyond having others promote your wares, you’ll also capitalize on higher rankings that will enable you to extract more gold from free search engine traffic.