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Optimizing Your Website’s eCommerce to be more SEO friendly

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Webmasters all over share certain goals and one huge goal is to make sure that their sites are optimized to be more SEO friendly. This is especially true for ecommerce websites. SEO is a necessary component of any organic search engine traffic. Ecommerce sites are generally utilizing many marketing tactics already, but that does not mean they should limit themselves. Search engines can provide a lot of power for ecommerce sites and help the company gain exposure.

That being said, many ecommerce websites are still not utilizing all of the components of SEO which they could. For ecommerce sites to truly expound upon SEO to their advantage they must cover a few basic necessities. By doing this you will help generate traffic to the site in a fast and simple manner.

The first step is to ensure that your company is using an SEO-friendly shopping cart. When you have to modify your pages at a later date and change the page optimization for your site you will be glad that the shopping cart is ready. Things are simpler with the use of an SEO-friendly shopping cart. It is important that when you are deciding upon the many shopping cart options that you do not make it harder for yourself, but instead you are able to easily apply SEO.

The next most important thing is to use a proper internal linking structure. You want to make sure that the impression you leave on search engines is a positive one. To do this you need to have a great internal linking strategy which makes it easier for search engines and users to navigate. You should focus on more than just your visitors—focus on the search engine spiders and make your site friendly for them. If your focus is on authority websites you will quickly see that their related content is linked. This makes it easier for visitors to travel from page to page and not face any problems. This is very useful and relevant for visitors and also helps SEO by providing lots of internal links and influencing rank. Search engines take ranking very seriously. If you integrate anchor text when linking related pages together search engines will be happier and you will get a higher ranking.

It is also important that you make new material for your website so that you can rank higher based upon your group of keywords. With an eCommerce website you might find it challenging to keep your material fresh. You can do this by having customers write product reviews. With an ecommerce site you will have lists of products. Customers should be given the opportunity to place positive and negative reviews and opinions related to your products. This can create active conversations and thus direct traffic to your site. People who are new to your site will see lots of happy reviews when they first arrive. Doing this means that the search engines have new material to crawl since customers are continually leaving new material and comments. It is a simple idea which can generate a lot of SEO results. Treat an ecommerce website the same as you would another website. Your goal is to achieve the highest rank.

Optimize Your SEO for Local Businesses

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Local Search is really taking off these days, especially with the inception of Google Plus.  Right now Google Plus is good for personal pages, but Google + for Business is right around the corner and will be a huge “plus” for local search.

In order to optimize your localization SEO for your business, you need to utilize keyword research. Your on-site optimization is based upon keyword research. Google Analytics is the industry standard for analyzing web keywords.  The use of the keyword filter should help you to target the local used keywords for your small business.  Keyword research is one of the most important SEO components for any business. It is this research which determines who is able to find your website and who is not and by what keyword are being searched for.  If you neglect to incorporate important keywords then you lose targeted traffic. The less traffic you have the lower the opportunities for sales conversion.

When you use keyword research tools you will get national search volume information. However, in order to determine keywords for a local small business you do not need national level rankings. What you need is to help your company appeal to the local levels. This can be done with Google Places.

Use of Google Places:
Google places is referred to as virtual real estate for businesses that are listed in the top keyword searched spots. Small businesses can submit their site to Google Places, a virtual directory, for free. This is particularly useful for small businesses which are new or on a tight budget. Small business owners cannot afford to overlook the importance of using Google Places. The purpose of the directory is to connect local smart phone and internet users to local businesses near their area. With a smart phone, users can take advantage of the Google apps to find locations near them at any time. This is not only beneficial for the customer but for the local businesses. In order to take advantage of this, businesses must place their complete listing on Google Places, and enjoy the benefits reaped from it in terms of increased customers and profit.

The rise of the iPhone and Google Android smart phones, using Google Places has become one of the most popular means of marketing a small business. Out of all the daily online activity conducted via smart phones, nearly seventy five percent of it relates to local content on Google (comsore.com). Now, more than ever, small businesses should use the services provided with Google Places to increase their local customer base and draw attention to their company. Google Places is a viable tool for local marketing because it includes all of the same features that social customers need. There are demographics based upon geo-location, as well as reviews, recommendations, connected sharing, and mobile based marketing. Customers using social networks can even make recommendations to others on their network, which increases your small business. Whether you are a dry cleaners, dentist, or café, using Google Places means that people in your area and nearby can find your company instantly, review the pertinent information about the company, and then get directions to your doorstep.

As a free web marketing service, Google Places offers businesses an opportunity to describe their services and their products, including their hours of operation, their email address, phone number, address, and website. Small businesses can include photos and videos as well as customer views to enhance the Places page. When customers conduct localized search queries, Google Places pages appear at the top based upon category and location. They are generally accompanied by a red push pin which indicates the location of your business. From there users can click directly to the business website, read reviews, or read the Places page.

There are new tools offered to small businesses thanks to improvements on Google Places. Google places offers local maps which highlight the most popular places on the left hand side, which—if your business makes it to the top seven—is a very useful tool. It also puts local places listings above organic listings which help to increase your size and visibility. The listings with Google Places are more social than with organic listings because it leaps into the space for reviews and recommendations. It also ties directly to Google Maps and all of the related mobile applications for Google Maps which are used by potential customers.

I suggest digesting this infographic created by Mike Blumenthal.

Click to Enlarge

 

 

How Outdated SEO Tactics Hurt Your Website’s SEO

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SEO is one of the most important components of any online success. If you have a website then you know that SEO tactics have changed quickly over time with very large leaps and bounds. Things which might be useful one day are suddenly outdated the next. Understanding a complete guideline to SEO is challenging because the rules are constantly changing. New features ware being added and old features are being removed.

No longer can you simply build a website and get top rankings through metatags and keywords. There are many tactics now which are outdated and will ruin your website’s SEO. The first is keyword stuffing. Stuffing tons of keywords into your keyword metatag is useless. Using keyword metatags at all is an outdated SEO tactic. The algorithms used by search engines have become more complex which means that they search for content rather than just keywords. The keywords need to be tactfully integrated into the header, body, title tags, footer, and sub headings.

The second outdated SEO tactic is blog comment spamming. Webmasters might leave comments in online forums which link to their website but this is now considered spam. Google will see which links are posted in online communities or forums and will not give you credit for that link popularity. It is better to post well written comments and blogs with the links instead of spamming.

The third outdated SEO tactic is search engine submission. Many people used to provide services for submitting things to search engines. Today that service is dead. Create unique content and get links instead. Use social media accounts to link to your website. Search engines are recognizing the usefulness and authority offered by social networks.

The fourth outdated SEO tactic is meta tag optimization. Meta tags once played a large role in determining your page rank but not anymore. Search engines no longer notice them. Google has stated on record that they do not pay attention to meta keywords tag. Therefore, stuffing your content should no longer happen. Instead you can use tag and category systems to label and organize the content on your website. If you actively tag your pages and posts in an effective manner you can enjoy better usability, functionality, and search-ability.

The fifth outdated SEO tactic is link exchange. Exchanging links was once a popular method of building your websites’ links but no longer. Reciprocal link exchange was fine in moderation, but interlinking in order to increase your popularity is. When website owners actively engage in schemes to increase their link exchange and influence their rankings, Google will take notice and the website owner will be punished. Instead of this tactic, try to get active testimonials and reviews from vendors with whom you work. This is a favorable method of getting links to your website. Along the same lines, link buying is another outdated tactic. Link buying is when you buy links from websites in order to improve your search engine rank. This includes paying for reviews and using a link brokering service. Both are now frowned upon and can severely hurt your SEO.

How Duplicate Content Can Kill Your Website’s SEO

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Many people and businesses type websites think that they can increase their search engine rankings or obtain multiple listings by providing multiple copies of the same page or similar copies of the same page because the presence of keywords is higher. Therefore, it’s important to keep in mind that duplicate content can be a silent killer and be detrimental to your website. Search engines, as Google, want and need fresh, new, unique relevant content on every page. Many websites, blogs and companies do not realize that having duplicate content means they could face a loss in traffic and SEO will ultimately suffer, especially new website marketers.

Duplicate Content = The Silent Website Killer

Google seeks to bring results that are based on relevant keywords. When you see multiple pages which have the same content, it means that content was taken(or stolen) from someone else’s site. This results in search engines being unable to differentiate between which site holds the authority to the copy. This is a large problem if many people start to link many versions of the same copy. Google Webmaster Tools will help you to diagnose whether or not your site has duplicate content, as well as Copyscape.com.

It is common to see two forms of duplicate content on sites today:

  1. Identically written pages which are listed on different websites. In simplistic terms, this means that the same article or blog post is listed on two different websites. This is considered to be duplicate and therefore considered unacceptable in Google’s eyes. This is a problem for associated sites which have the same or similar look and feel to them. With identical content, they are at a high risk for being marked as spam.
  2. Scraping (also called Web harvesting or Web data extraction) is a technique of extracting information(or text) from websites. It simply means that you are using a program to remove the text from one website and place it on yours. The biggest problems associated with duplicate content are that search engines are unable to identify which version or versions should be ranked for query results. Search engines also do not know which of the version or versions should be included or excluded from their indexes. Another major issue with duplicate, scraped content is that the search engines do not know whether they should direct the link metrics to a single page or keep the link metrics separated between the multiple versions.

When search engine robots crawl through a website, they will read, store and sort the information found in their database. After this, the robots will compare the findings on one with information already contained in the database. Using multiple factors, including the overall relevancy score related to the particular website, the search bot will determine which content is duplicate content. It will then filter out the pages which qualify as spam or the websites which qualify as spam. If your pages are not spam but they still contain enough similar content to be considered as such, they still run of the risk of being regarded as spam.

Many popular sites have been caught scraping content from other websites for the purpose of increasing their SEO, which happens at the expense of the other sites which already contain the information. Larger websites, which scrape content and post duplicate content for the purpose of SEO rankings, will outrank smaller websites and blogs, which leaves the smaller sites marked as spam. Google works very hard to ensure that duplicate content does not exist.

10 SEO Mistakes That Will Kill Your Site’s SEO

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There are many mistakes which people can make that result in killing your website. These are often simple and avoidable mistakes which can cripple your chances of optimizing your site. The first mistake is coding. Coding can hurt your SEO if you choose to use difficult coding such as Javascript. Simpler code can offer the same results with less spider issues.

The second mistake often made is the choice of keywords. When people decide upon the keyword phrases they should pick a select few which will then be integrated throughout their site. By focusing on a small group of important keywords you can increase your SEO. If you try to incorporate every keyword which relates to your niche then you will waste all of your time trying to incorporate each word in all of your web content and will lose out on many search engine results.

The third mistake people make is having long and confusing URL’s which cannot be navigated with ease. The best URL will have relevant keywords and only use dynamic characters or a few slashes. The pages and names should be in line with your specific content so that the spiders and visitors can appreciate it.

The fourth mistake made is thinking that title tags do not matter. You cannot get away with only using a single title tag throughout your website. You need to create a unique title tag for each page which will explain what the page is about. These title tags will show up in all search engine results and as such can better convince visitors to click on your website.

The fifth mistake is not watching out for splash pages. It is important not to leave your home page bare. You need to keep it focused. If you do use a splash page you want to ensure that the content contained therein is relevant and has lots of navigation in it so that the search engines will go through your entire site.

The sixth mistake is thinking that all of the search engines are the same. Each search engine has a unique plan and your business might rank better with one search engine than another. The top search engines are Yahoo, MSN, and Google because they can attract local attention to your niche through vertical and visual search engines. The seventh mistake made which can kill your company’s SEO is just trading backlinks instead of getting good backlinks. It is important that you get links from related sites which are of good quality. If you trade backlinks with other webmasters you might not help your SEO rank as much as you think, especially if they are unrelated to your niche.

The eighth mistake is not balancing graphics and text. It can be very detrimental to have underutilized graphics or excess graphics. With a lot of flash or too many images your rank will go down instead of increasing. You need to always have text to back up the images.

The ninth biggest mistake which can adversely affect your SEO is not delivering your promises. Your site should offer everything that you say it offers so that visitors find what they want and expect on your site.

The tenth and final mistake made is thinking that only SEO matters and not paying attention to the other facets of your balanced marketing plan.

3MultiMedia – Tony Eden

A digital agency on a mission to help small and medium businesses with their online presence. I work from my California Office to take your ideas and turn them into a digital online design for you.
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