Tag Archive for: SEO

5 SEO Tips for E-Commerce

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Doing SEO for an e-commerce site is tricky.  Almost all the pages are virtually identical, so it’s hard to determine how to do standard SEO for these pages.  Here are five quick tips to help you do some solid SEO for your e-commerce site (a shortened version of the excellent explanation on Search Engine Land):

  1. Do solid SEO on product pages. Focusing on these will help draw traffic to each specific product.  Standard SEO rules apply here – especially remember the title tag, as that will make a big difference.  And keep it search engine friendly – using a lot of Flash or something else the spiders don’t like is not recommended.
  2. Proper categorization. Every product fits into specific categories.  Making sure you use this as best you can will help.  If selling a television, keep all categories in mind, such as a brand name, the size of the television, the type of tv, so forth.  The more detailed your categories, the easier to find (good SEO).
  3. Avoid duplication. Having duplicate pages is a big SEO no-no.  If you have your URLs structured based on categories, then you can often have each category branching through other categories to a single product, resulting in different URLs but the same content (duplicate pages).  To avoid this, you can use parameters (the same URL, different arguments) or even just 301 the duplicate pages all to one single product page.
  4. Use the on-site search engine. To start, having a good on-site search engine is highly recommended for all internet marketing purposes.  If you have one – checking the queries people put into it are easy ways to see what people are searching for that couldn’t find it naturally.  This is a big “SEO THIS” sign.
  5. Social media! Yes, get on board.  By letting people comment on your products or share them with others through social media, you can often get more inbound links than you might expect.  Just make it easy for users and visitors to be able to share, whether it be through on-site widgets or a site blog, or even profiles on social media sites.

These tips will help your products on your e-commerce site be found, both through social media and through the search engines.  These tips are a revised version of the excellent explanation by Aaron Bradley on Search Engine Land.

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SEO vs. PPC – Will Use of One Increase with Demand of Another?

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As companies begin using more and more online marketing, SEO is only going to get more difficult to do well.  In some cases, businesses are worried spammers are going to get the organic listings more readily and are starting to look to PPC marketing for their search result answers.

This is something that’s come to notice mainly from Google’s real-time search results that were recently added.  This addition favors fresh topical content, over quality results Google’s algorithm can find.  This is something that spammers can get into very easily, and this is why more companies are starting to consider PPC and AdWords, where spammers are not able to get into at all.

HighPosition.net has more detail on this story.

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SEO Jobs: Demand is Going Up For SEO Skills

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It looks like holiday shopping this year has moved even more heavily online.  As companies are realizing that more people are actively searching online for their commercial searches, they’re starting to see the value of search engine optimization.

Because of this, the IT industry is starting to anticipate a high demand for SEO skills in 2010.  (Yay for us professional SEOs!)  In Great Britain alone, demand for SEO and online marketing skills went up by 40% last year.

The skills of SEO, pay per click management, social media marketing and web design are all being looked for, ideally in a combined package.  SourceWire has all the details in an article based on this story in the UK.  (And I have to add a little something something here – Tulsa Marketing Online does in fact do SEO, PPC, social media and web design.  Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.)

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Social Media and SEO: How They Tie Together

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Social media’s been the big thing lately.  Mainly because it’s something almost everyone uses.  Not that many people know what search engine optimization is and the difference between on page optimization and off page optimization, or what PageRank sculpting is.  But you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a Facebook account.

Well, social media is very effective for business promotion – but the key to using it well is knowing how to make it tie into SEO.  Doing good social media is building relationships, and this fits in with SEO by making sure that these quality relationships help build your site and site pages’ reputation (in a good way, hopefully).

Adam Stafford from TechRadar has a great article on how these two things tie together and how to make them work, plus some great examples on how some companies have made them work well.

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Keywords Meta Tag Testing on Video

I’ve talked about how much it bugs me that so many people still think the keywords meta tag is the “secret trick” for SEO.  Well, back in October I put together a video demonstrating a test I did on this tag.  I tested Ask.com, Bing, Yahoo, and Google.  Does it work?  Is it really the secret to SEO?  You can see the results of how this turned out below.

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Demographics and SEO – Targeting Your Pages

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Most SEOs look at the keywords for their research – but what about focus on the demographics?  By looking at the actual PEOPLE that visit your pages, it can make a big difference beyond the search positions.

Sure, doing solid SEO will get you into position.  But will that always be the best way to bring your best traffic?  Doing full research on your market and the people searching for your material can often bring to light details that, if focused on properly, can help convert visitors to business.

So many SEOs I see don’t ever think of their visitors past the search engine results page.  By looking at who is doing the searches and making the whole experience a better one for them, you’ll get better results (and Google will likely like you more for it).

Carrie Hill at Search Engine Land has a great article detailing how to do this, and more suggestions on how to make it work.

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Be Found Online! By Best Buy?

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For those of you who don’t know who Danny Sullivan is – one, if you’re an SEO, shame on you.  Two, if you want to learn about SEO, learn who he is.

At any rate, Danny Sullivan is one of the most respected SEOs on the planet.  He knows his stuff.  He works diligently to learn about search engines (in particular, Google) and how they operate.

SEO is something that is becoming more and more well-known, as people and businesses realize this is how sites are to be found online.  Because of this, there are a lot of gimmicky SEO plugs (“Pay only $200/month and 1st page listings in 90 days!” types of stuff) going around.  They really annoy me.

Apparently Best Buy is getting in on this.  And they’re including social media in their “be found online” mix.  It’s through a company called “CloudProfile”.  And it’s FREE.

The best part?  They pitched to (of all people) Danny Sullivan.  And he’s taking them up on their offer.  See his word on it here.

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UK Tabloid Daily Mirror is Thinking of Humans

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I love this story, mainly because it touches on the element that so many SEOs (and marketers) miss – connecting with people.  It’s actually a tabloid that has attracted attention for making sure their focus is more on people than on search engines.

It’s great as a reminder – marketing should always be about thinking of connecting with people, not just crunching numbers.  If you only think of figures (traffic numbers, PPC costs, number of unique visitors) then you’ll likely lose a lot.  If you keep your focus on the people who visit your site, chances are you’ll gain many more fans (and revenue).

More info available also from The Guardian.

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How Do Breadcrumbs and SEO Mix?

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You may have noticed on Google lately that some of the listings are starting to show slightly different details on the results.  They’re putting breadcrumbs in, to help people see exactly what categories those results fit into.  How can you tell?  Instead of showing the blatant web site address, they’re putting greater than signs (“>”) between categories in that space.  That way, you know what site the page belongs to, but you don’t know the specific address, you know the categories the subpage that has shown belongs to.

This is one way Google has adjusted their algorithm to help users navigate the search engine results pages, but how else can you use breadcrumbs, in your own site?  One of my favorite internet marketers Ann Smarty has a detailed explanation on Search Engine Journal.  The key is to make sure you use them to help the user, not to help the search engines (a good rule to follow in general).

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How Important is Keyword Density in SEO?

Keyword density is the number of times your keyword or keyword phrase appears inside content on a web page, compared to the total amount of content.  This is considered by SEOs to be part of the on-page SEO for targeting a specific keyword for a site.

So how important is it, really?  As the search engines progress and develop further, their algorithms change to fit one desired outcome: judging web sites and pages in the same way humans do.  In this way, the highest quality web pages should show up at the top of the search engine results.

Considering this, making sure you have a keyword density of 3-5% is not something that most humans take into account when they visit a page.  I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t do a search for a keyword, land on the page, and then count the number of times that keyword appears, do the math, and then dismiss the page if that percentage is outside the magic range.  I read the page, see if the content is good and high quality, and make my judgements based on that.  And if it’s really good, I might even link to it from one of my own pages.

Too many SEOs worry about fitting keywords X number of times into content, to a degree that often makes the content feel more unnatural.  This only hurts their connection with the human visitors to their site.

As it is now, the search engines will look for keywords in content, but having a specific density percentage is not in the top of their search-quality priority list.  If the page is specifically on a certain topic, the keywords will naturally appear within the content.  Forcing it will generally not help for the search engines, and certainly will not help with your human visitors.

My recommendation is to simply write the content to stay on topic and don’t worry about embedding keywords.  If you keep your keywords in the proper core SEO locations, the search engines will know very well what your page is about without having to do any sort of deep content keyword analyzation.

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