Amazon versus eBay: making SEO pay

I’ve been talking about the virtues of Google Adsense for some weeks now, explaining how by monetising your website and using search engine optimisation techniques to increase your rankings you could earn a decent sum each month. Now it’s time to talk about alternatives to Google, or 2nd tier ads as I like to call them.

There are many sites and schemes out there offering you the chance to earn money from your website, but two of the best ones just happen to be two of the biggest (and oldest) ecommerce websites on the Internet. eBay and Amazon are established names, and offer very attractive and rewarding incentives for you to send them traffic and sales.

Amazon was one of the first websites to make any waves with its affiliate scheme, offering website owners the chance to earn commission on any sales made through their site. The first big development in the evolution of the affiliate scheme, turning it from a simple link into a full blown ecommerce store for the affiliate was the launch of Amazon’s Web Services that allowed programmers to write their own CGI applications using the Amazon catalogue.

This system caused webmasters to fall over themselves registering keyword rich domain names, designing stores and focusing on specific sections of Amazon’s products for SEO so they could earn revenue off the back of Amazon. Amazon was happy; they were getting sales. Webmasters were happy, they were making commissions. Customers were happy; they were finding bargains on Amazon by searching on Google and finding other people’s websites.

Google however, was not so happy. All of these affiliate sites were just clones of the Amazon catalogue, causing duplicate content spamming up the SERPs. Naturally this boom was short lived, but not before webmasters smart enough to get in at the start made their fortunes.

Amazon still have a system whereby you can build a site around their catalogue, and harness the full power of the Amazon database to earn commission from any sales you make. However, simply registering my-cheap-books.com and pulling every book from Amazon’s website isn’t going to make you your fortune. It’s content that’s required now, fresh, original well written content. If you have this on your website then Amazon’s affiliate scheme could be the ideal tool to monetise your website, particularly if your site focuses on a product range that Amazon carry, such as books, toys, DVDs – well, let’s face it; these days Amazon carry everything you could possibly buy, so the sky’s your limit.

Amazon is always changing the way their affiliate scheme works as well, as it’s one of the oldest and best available on the Internet. Amazon has tools such as Dynamic content boxes that fill predefined areas of your website with products based on the content of your page – so all you need to worry about is adding new content!

Amazon has just launched a new tool that’s still in beta testing now, the contextual links tool. This funky little JavaScript can be placed in the footer of your website and it will automatically scrape your page when it loads and pull out keywords, turning them into links to products on Amazon. With this tool you could take a 1,000 page website and instantly add 10,000 Amazon links to it just by pasting in one line of JavaScript; genius.

Imagine having a tool like this added to a forum… your forum users would be adding affiliate links for you simply by posting on the forum.

Amazon hasn’t had it all its own way however, as eBay has seen just as rapid a rise in the Internet world. Founded in 1995 and floated in 1998, making the two owners instant billionaires, eBay has grown into one of the largest and most successful Internet businesses, buying out PayPal in 2002.

Obviously they have an affiliate scheme, and an excellent one to boot. The whole beauty of eBay is that they sell just about anything that’s legal, and every minute thousands upon thousands of auctions close, netting the sellers (and eBay) profits. Their affiliate scheme had to adopt this concept, so rather than just being a collection of links and banners eBay allow publishers’ websites to feature live auction listings through their ‘Editor Kit’ and ‘Product Kit’ technologies.

This means that if you have a 1,000 page website featuring reviews on books you can add eBay’s Editor Kit code and your site will instantly have tens of thousands of live auction listings based on the subject of each individual page. Anyone looking at your website will be offered the chance to bid on the items they are reading about; equally genius.

eBay’s scheme has suffered a little of late due to its own success as the bulk of eBay payouts were based on customer sign-ups – the problem being of course that most people using the Internet these days are already eBay members. Therefore any referrals you sent to eBay from your website didn’t convert, because they already had an eBay account. eBay have made alterations to their payment structure to offer more for bids and final valuation payouts though, so hopefully their scheme won’t be against the ropes for long.

So if you’re looking for a viable alternative to Adsense, or a 2nd tier advertiser, both Amazon and eBay have the tools to satisfy your requirements.

Darren Jamieson
SEO Programmer