The Power of 5 – A Guide to Ecommerce SEO

Now, this is something that you are going to hear me whining about on a regular basis because if you get you site looking right and you do nothing else but the following 5 things – you are still going to get good results.

Of course I want to take this a lot further and show you how to get great results – but let’s talk about five things that are the most important to the success of your online business.

So – Number 1 – you must optimize your title tags. Yes, we have spoken about this already and yes we will be speaking about it again, because this is step one in your on site SEO campaign. The first part of telling the search engines exactly what the page is about.

And remember that this is every page that you want to rank for. So we’re not talking about your terms and conditions page, your about us page or returns and so on – we’re talking about the pages that make you MONEY.

Number 2

You need to repeat your main keyword within the page description. So, let me clarify in case there is any confusion here.

First let’s talk about an e-stores home page – the rules are slightly different for what I will be teaching you with blogs.

Your home page – your www.mystore.com page will have the title tags optimised for 2 – 3 main key-phrases that you want to rank for overall – the most. These will be the key-phrases that you have determined will bring the most targeted traffic for what you are selling and the most bang for your buck. They will most likely be keywords that you will initially not expect to rank for, but that’s cool because you are going to be concentrating on those long-tail keywords initially.

Your meta description tag will then also have a repeat of your number one key-phrase in it – again this is what you want to rank for the absolute most for your overall site.

You will then have those key-phrases repeated and optimized again within the content of your HOME PAGE.

Ok – so that the stores home page – so what about the category and product pages?

Your category pages are really important and you will be choosing the ‘theme’ of these and then targeting the long-tail keywords for them. So perhaps your site sells baby clothing but you have a category for baby shoes or maybe more specifically – baby shoes for girls and another for baby shoes for boys, you’ll be establishing the best long-tail keywords for these and then optimizing them in the same way as the home page – title tags, description, header tags, content and anchor text.

Finally you’ll be at your product pages and these again will be optimised via title tags (containing the product title and keywords) – you’ll need to be descriptive and specific and you must do your research for this as a small tweak can make a huge difference.
Going back to selling baby shoes, let’s imagine that you have some little baby shoes for a girl made from pink leather and they have bits n bobs stuck on for decoration. Now you may have them in your store with the title tag ‘Pink Shoes for Baby Girl’ and sell one or two pairs a week, that’s great but a quick bit of research and you might find that that phrase ‘Pink Shoes for Baby Girl’ only gets searched for 15 times a week in Google. So even though you may be ranking highly for it – no one is looking for it.

Then you notice that the search term ‘Baby Girls Leather Shoes with Embellishments’ is having a high search rate of 100+ searches a week and as that is the product you are selling – you change the title tags, the description and start to optimize it differently – and now you are enjoying sales of 30+ a week.

Now, I’ve pulled those figures out of the air to give you an example of how keyword research can make a dramatic difference but the truth is, whilst those figures are made up, I’ve only used small numbers to portray how highly effective this is, the truth of the matter is; a store who recognises the value of this and makes the changes correctly can enjoy an increase of thousands over their product range.

Your description will likely be pulled from the first sentence of your product description depending on what shopping cart your use. IF and this is a BIG if – you have the ability within your shop platform to change these titles and descriptions – then do it.

If you have the ability within your shop to write one title for Google and one for your on-site customer – then do it as you can use more keywords to drive traffic to that product but less within the titles of your store – so it doesn’t look offputting to a customer.

If you don’t understand that – don’t worry, we’ll be looking at that in more detail.

Now not all of you will have that software available, so use your noodles. You have to tailor to both the search engines and the customer. Your description, if pulled manually by the search engine will likely be the first sentence of your product description – so make it good.

Number 3

Make use of your header tags as Google uses them to reinforce what your page is about. So a title of a page will be in <H1> tags but you can also use <H2> <H3> and so on until about <H6> although there’s really no need for you to take it that low. It’s best to use it in order of importance too, so as you write your description for your products or your text for your category page, think about breaking it up a little with some header tags and add in 1 or 2 of your researched keyphrases in a way that flows for your customer and doesn’t look odd.

Ok – so number 4 then – links and anchor text. This is actually number 4 and number 5 – but let me break this down a bit.

First of all we want to use descriptive anchor text to pass from one place in our site to another – (now apologies again if I am boring you and repeating myself – but this has to become a complete no-brainer for you!)

So, back to that anchor text then – you want to let Google know exactly what the page you are linking to is all about – and Google reads anchor text. If you send Google to a page about lemons with the anchor text lemon – it’s worth more to the rank of the page of lemons than if you just said – click here.

Now every link to the page of lemons is a good thing – but tell Google its lemons, and it finds lemons and now we are starting to get a lemon page that is ranking.

I mean its logical, loads of people – links – have told Google there’s a great page about lemons – Google has noted all of these links and thought – d’you what, that page is about lemons and it’s pretty damn popular. It’s getting a load of links!

Now, this can be done internally as well as externally. A link from a page in your site with a page rank of 1 is worth more than a link coming in with a page rank of 0.

But this does move us neatly on to number 5 – which is links part two! A page will rank higher in the search engines based on the amount of links it has pointing to it! FACT!

Now – Google is pretty good at finding spammy sites and getting rid of them but they do enjoy an initial rise because of the sheer volume of links that point to them – orchestrated of course by the spammer or website owner! Once some nice person from Google HQ has looked at the page and decided it’s not actually worthy of the high ranking it seems to have – it starts to vanish!

But – if it’s a nice product page that clearly sells what it is optimized for – it’s left to enjoy its high ranking status.

So the upshot of it is – you need back-links – and you need a lot! We can do our on site and off site SEO but without the power of 5 – as just discussed – we’re fighting a losing battle.

So – we will be drilling down into all of this. I will show you the way – and if you implement it, you’ll soon be heading up the Google highway to riches!

Technorati Tags: ecommerce seo, ecommerce seo guide

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