Use of Keywords In Affiliate Programs

[WorldBusiness]

Hi,

I'm a member of the Performics Affiliate Program, I host advertisers' ads on my website. Today I received an email from one of them about popular keywords and they suggested I use them on my site. My website deals primarily w/ sports and physical fitness related information; it does have affiliate ads for clothing and cars to increase revenue. In my keywords I only use those for my articles not for any affiliates. Do any of you other webmasters use affiliates keywords to drive traffic to your site? or Do you just use keywords relevant to the articles posted on a given page?

I wouldn't want the SEs to penalize me for using non relevant keywords.

[Marcia]

Use of keywords should be in context for where they're placed on pages/sites, at least if they're in the body of the text. But you could do some posts and have a category on sports and fitness related clothing. Like shoes, for example: people don't jog in high heels or sandals, there are specific types of footwear (and clothes) that are or can be worn.

[AussieWebmaster]

also you can learn what the terms are that close when an affiliate sends them to you and try adwords.... track and see if that works

[WorldBusiness]

Thank you both for the advice.

[Dan01]

It only takes a few minutes to write an article. I don't see any problem writing an article about the keywords - you wont be penalized. Don't over-stuff the article though. That is what I think.

[Arun Lakhera]

If the keywords are highly searched and relevant to your website then there should be no problem in using them. You can check the search results of those keywords by using a keyword selector tool.

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Hi WorldBusiness, Marsha is right.
The KW's need to be relevant to the page.

Typically when merchants give you KW lists it's for you to target a page specifically about their products.

So if your site is about Fitness in general you wouldn't want a bunch of Tennis shoe KWs. But if you built a page for your Fitness site all about running shoes, then since the merchant knows their products better than you, their KW list can be used to help interested consumers find the targeted info they are looking for and the thats what the search engines want!

So always think about relevance and have the page title, meta title and content all be about a tightly focused topic and related key phrases and you'll be fine.