Customer traffic is vital to any commercial website, and as an ecommerce site owner this is no less true. As important as product research and product supply is to the success of your business, you need targeted traffic to stay solvent. By targeted traffic, I mean visitors who are already interested in and possibly already wanting to buy what you have to sell. The three major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing can be an invaluable source of free traffic if you pay attention to certain basic principles of search engine optimization (SEO). I don’t want to suggest that you rely only on search engine traffic, but there is no reason not to take advantage of what they have to offer.
Assuming that you have your product or products, supply sources, and your website designed and coded or otherwise figured out, it is now time to work the search engines into your marketing plan. There really is no one-size-fits-all template for search engine optimization (SEO), and there can be numerous aspects to take into consideration when designing an overall approach. However, there are some basic strategies and principles common to all SEO approaches. These include what we call on-page and off-page optimization.
On-page, or on-site optimization generally refers to the content on your site, and how you use the keywords and phrases on your site. Although your keywords will include product names, they will also include the specific search terms people type into the search engines in order to find your products. Content means all text elements and excludes words and phrases in images, as search engines cannot “see” images. However, keep in mind that your site must appear natural for human visitors and your content must, as well, be natural and easy to read for human visitors. Proper use of meta tags can also help the search engines understand and rank your site accurately. Meta tags are coding that search engines see but that visitors do not. The title, keyword, and description tags allow you to enter a title, list of keywords, and description that only the search engines see.
The most important content for our purposes will be your keywords and phrases, articles, products descriptions, blog posts, and customer comments and testimonials. A well optimized page will show the keywords in menu names, category listings, headlines, titles of articles and product descriptions. You will use the content as an opportunity to position your keywords and phrases for best search engine exposure. How you present your keywords in your product descriptions, blog posts and so forth allows you to shape not only how the search engines see and respond to your pages but also to address the needs and wants of your potential buyers.
Off-page optimization generally concerns the number and quality of links pointing back to your site from either other websites or from your own internal pages. Back links are possibly the most important element of SEO, and while a site with excellent on-page optimization has a definite advantage, with enough back links you can force an excellent page rank regardless of content. As an ecommerce site owner, back links can play a key part in focusing search engine attention on your pages and content. You can actually control this by choosing the sites you link back from, the kind of anchor text used, how you use link networks, and where you point your back links. Practical ways of backlinking include mass publication of RSS feeds, mass publication of videos across many video publishing sites, submission of articles to directories, use of social publishing platforms such Squidoo and Hubpages. Proper use of social bookmarking and social news sites is also effective in producing back links when done on a large enough scale.
Many online marketers now establish a business presence on sites such as Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. These allow easy, network access to thousands of potential customers and a potential source of back links to your sites. You do have to spend the time to build a presence that people can trust. To some degree you accomplish this by the quality of content you publish. People will know you by your words. If they like what they find, they will follow you to your principle site.
Social bookmarking sites allow you and others to make bookmarks back to your site’s pages, articles, and social networking content and anything else you want to create a link back to. These in turn allow the search engines and human visitors easy access to your site and networking pages. Another source of back links is the use of Squidoo, Hubpages and other free hosting, such as Tumblr, Plaxo, WordPress.com, and Blogger.com to build sites and blogs that point to your main ecommerce venture. You can then, in turn, use social bookmarking to also bring attention to these web properties. This article really only scratches the surface of your possibilities. Whatever you do, don’t be halfhearted and haphazard. Decide which strategies fit your business model and pursue those with a vengeance. Don’t bother with the others unless you decide that they can be productive for your business. Remember, business success requires persistence over the long term.
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categories: ecommerce seo,ecommerce traffic
