As an affiliate marketer you should track and cloak your links. Tracking your links will show you where your getting your sales. Cloaking your links is important in Search Engine Optimization, click through rates, and in thwarting affiliate theft. It is important to understand these concepts in order to increase your income in affiliate marketing.

Let’s look at cloaking links first. If you’ve ever noticed the appearance of affiliate links, they are rather ugly. Many people are caucus of links that they’re not familiar with and might not click them, which will negatively affect your conversion rate.

Let me give you an example. Which of these two links are you more likely to click on?: www.yourdomain.com/sixpackabs or www.yourdomain.com/eoaihreohroeihrherheurhauer1223. The chances are good that you would click through the cloaked link because it makes more sense and looks like it comes from a domain name. Most web surfers will subconsciously trust the cloaked link without giving it much thought.

A growing number of website owners believe that cloaking links helps in search engine optimization because it allows for keyword optimization. There is evidence that search engines like Google are getting more strict on pages with affiliate links. These are a few of the reasons that cloaked links are more search engine friendly. So try running a test yourself and see whether your page rank improves when you cloak your links instead of just leaving them exposed.

The biggest reason to cloak your links is to prevent affiliate theft. This is a sad reality today and it doesn’t have to occur with just an ounce of prevention. The problem is that there are crooks out there who will find your link and simply replace their affiliate code with the one you had. Affiliate marketing, like anything else, is very competitive and some people might even steal from you just so they can make money online. If you cloak your links though, it won’t be as obvious and you can truly eliminate commission theft.

There are quite a few link cloaking tools available today. WordPress users can access a plugin called Simple Link Cloaker which offers an easy, and free, solution with just a few clicks of the mouse. Take a look around and you’ll find quite a few options like this available.

Let’s now look at tracking your sales. As your sales start to increase, it will become necessary to know where your sales are coming from so that you can improve your marketing strategies. Many of the affiliate networks provide tracking services and so you are able to determine which specific links were utilized when tracking ID’s are included. For instance, when you create a link through ClickBank, they permit you to add a tracking ID to the end of each link. There are also other tracking options out there, such as Prosper 202 (free) and Xtreme Conversions, Both provide even more robust data.

As your affiliate marketing business matures, you’ll be increasingly interested in seeing where your business is coming from, and tracking all the details of your data depends on the tools you use. Some tools can track which keywords are most effective in sales generation. Other options will only track click rates and how many sales were generated. Ultimately, gathering this information will help you maximize your marketing efforts and increase you online income. If you haven’t started cloaking and tracking your links, perhaps today is the day to begin.

The Affiliate Marketing Institute has a top notchonline training program. Visit the site to get more information and to sign up for their 14 day trial membership for less than $3.00.