Basic Elements of Optimizing Ecommerce for the Search Engines

As an ecommerce site owner, you know that just having a site loaded with products isn’t enough to make your store a success. You need traffic just as a brick and mortar store does. Although there are numerous ways to bring traffic to your site, one important source of free traffic are the search engines, the three most important of which are Google, Yahoo! and Bing. The search engines can be a tremendous force driving natural traffic already predisposed to want your products if you understand some of the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). Although how search engines work can be quite complicated, the fundamental aspects of optimizing your site for best search engine exposure are not, and the time taken to understand how to use SEO is time well spent.

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.

The key on-page factors I want to discuss are keywords and site content. Keywords include the specific words and phrases people use to find your site. Since you are selling a specific products (or products), as much as possible you want your site pages to include the phrases that people type into the search engines when looking for your product line. You can position your keywords in a number of ways, such as through the use of the title, keyword, and description meta tags for your site and individual pages. The use of meta tags is somewhat controversial in terms of effectiveness. Webmasters generally use the basic tags used above because the search engines do sometimes use them to make ranking decisions.

The principle means of positioning your keywords and phrases is accomplished through your site’s content. This would include all the words, phrases, and text used to inform visitors and potential customers about your products, business, news, and anything else that could be of interest to your targeted customer population. In other words, the content comprises the articles, product descriptions, advertising, blog posts, RSS feeds and anything else you publish on your site. This allows you to show case specific key words so that it catches both the attention of the search engines and the human visitors you want to draw to your ecommerce site. The art of “show casing” specific words and phrases is the practice crafting content so that it both addresses the needs of your targeted audience and also acts as search engine bait through skilled use of the language and choice of words.

Off-page SEO is extremely important, and the most important aspect of off-page optimization to be concerned about are back links point to your site. A back link is a merely a link on another site that leads back to your site. From a search engine ranking perspective, the more back links you have the better. Effective techniques for generating back links include publishing RSS feeds (which link back to your site’s pages), blog commenting, establishing links on profile pages, publishing articles, and buying text links. Buying text links is somewhat controversial, but when done correctly can be effective. Social bookmarking and social news sites can also work well.

Social resources that every true ecommerce site owner should take advantage of are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Linkedin. You can do research to determine which of these would best serve your particular business model. However, as a general recommendation, establish a professional business presence on Facebook and Twitter. This will allow you potential access to many thousands of buyers and can ramp up your traffic numbers hugely. For this to work you must have a real business and take care to set up your profile in professional manner. If you take the time to do a little research with Facebook, you will find that there are many businesses operating from that site. You can actually set up a store using Facebook as the front. I don’t know whether this would work for you–my point is that Facebook and business go very well together.

Social bookmarking sites and social news sites have long been used by website owners as an SEO and traffic strategy. As an ecommerce merchant, you can also take advantage of this resource. Social bookmarking allows you and other to create bookmarks back to specific pages on your site. When done on a large scale, you generate not only a large number of back links, but also increase traffic because people will find these links and follow them. Other sites that can be helpful are Squidoo and Hubpages. These are free, social publishing platforms. These can be helpful as feeder sites to your main domain. Also, you can send back links to these properties using social bookmarking and news sites. Whatever you do, don’t use these resources haphazardly. Decide if they should be part of your business model or not. If yes, then use them consistently. If no, then leave them alone and do something that you think would be more productive. Keep in mind that success demands your persistence and that you follow through with your business plan.

Learn more about ecommerce SEO and discover great tips on ecommerce product sourcing.