Conversion Junction

I learned a valuable lesson this past week that I would like to share with everyone. I am a notorious Squidoo fanatic and usually create a squidoo lens for every affiliate product that I am planning on promoting heavily.  I prefer to use the product name in my web address in order to rank well in the search engines for whatever product I am promoting. This past week I found out that this practice may not be a good idea.

For each product that I promote through Squidoo, I take a some time to do my keyword research to ensure that I can generate organic traffic to my lens. Depending on the availability of lens titles, I tend to use the products name or one of my top performing keywords for the url of my lens. Recently, while checking my affiliate back office, I noticed that one of my affiliate merchants were no longer part of the affiliate marketplace.

The  solution to this issue can be as simple a changing the affililate product to one that is similar, but if I change the lens url, I will lose all my inbound links. You see, I spent months building keyword riched inbound links to this particulars lens. My efforts was rewarded with page 1rankings in Google and Yahoo.  I could not use the lens for another product because the web address had a different product name. It is hard to promote “ABC Travel” when your web address reads “XYZ Travel”.

If your are not planning on fully optimizing your lens for natural search engine traffic, then I guess your should have no problem. If you are someone who lives and dies with organic traffic, you may want to consider some tweaking to your marketing efforts.

My advice to anyone planning on using Squidoo to promote their affiliate products or programs is to use your keywords in your web address instead of the product name. The use of your affiliate product may provide better SEO results, but if the product or company is not stable, your marketing efforts may go down the drain.