SEO and SEM
SEO Tricks to Defeat Your Competitors
The fact of the matter is, that even today, in a time where SEO is a necessary staple of most companies’ marketing mixes, many are missing the boat—even when it comes to their own branded products.
This blog post is devoted to e-commerce companies—more specifically, e-commerce companies whose own products are sold on various websites and often compete with their own distributors. A very large-scale example is Nike.
But I’m not talking to the Nike’s of the world (although they could probably benefit from this message in some way). I’m talking to the small to mid-sized businesses who are struggling with selling their very own products from their own websites.
SEO is critical in these situations, and marketing managers have some unique challenges that other companies may not encounter. While selling products through distributors is not a bad thing, it’s also very important that the corporate website perform as well. Also, because this website represents the brand online, you just need to be there.
Imagine you’re the marketing manager of one of these companies and you do a search for one of your own products—the branded name—and other websites position ahead of yours. What does that mean for business? What does it portray to your customers?
I’m here today to offer up a few SEO freebies. They’re simple, but they’re fundamental techniques I’ve seen ignored by MANY organizations.
• Help the search engines find your product pages. Search engines are getting much better at indexing dynamic URLs. We all know this. If your URLs are pretty good, leave them alone. Chances are, you’ll be alright, especially if they’ve been live for awhile. If they’re so-so, or really bad, consult with an SEO firm to determine the best way to rewrite them (if you should at all) and set the linking up properly. Yes, there are ways to make the situation worse.
• Whether you’re working with a friendly CMS or not, it’s still important to create unique title tags on your product pages. Again, the right SEO firm can likely help with this by authoring each title and meta tag, or by helping to create a plan to dynamically generate them. Tip: if you’re having trouble positioning for your own branded product names, begin the title tag with the exact product name.
• When you’re an e-commerce brand that has many distributors selling the exact same products on other websites, most often, they also have the same product descriptions. This is not in your best interest. Have one version of each product description for the corporate website, and one version for distributors. Don’t have the human bandwidth? Call Oneupweb. We’ll help you.
• My final SEO recommendation isn’t SEO-specific, but is so important to growing online sales. BE PRICE COMPETITIVE. #1 in search results or not, if the visitor can click the next result and find the product for 15% less with free shipping, they’re going to buy it there. Simple as that.
Okay, that’s it for today. Contact us for more. We’d love to hear your story—even if it’s not about a corn farmer and his death by SEO.
SEO Tips for E-Commerce Sites
A lot of people these days are all about Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 and it shows. Have you seen some of the “crap” that is on the Web these days? Sure it might be flashy and fancy… from a design point of view, but quite often, it sure does not help with the user experience or with the ability to find relevant results in a given search engine. I guess by title, I am an organic search strategist. I focus on SEO initiatives to help my clients intercept their target audience. I help them provide content that is useful, informative and relevant to their audience.
I do happen to work with some of the world’s most well known brands which happen to have large commerce sites. As a result, I evaluate their competition’s web presence as well. In 2009, I am amazed to see just how much fundamental organic optimization these large e-commerce sites lack. Even worse is the fact that some (many?) in the Search industry also overlook the fundamentals of SEO. So while this may be a refresher for many of you, I do know that there are some out there who will find the following SEO reminders useful.
SEO Reminders for e-Commerce Sites
1. Site Architecture is important for SEO success – guess what? If you cannot map out a search friendly architecture and layout of your site, you are simply not going to do well in the search results of the engines. Some key points to remember:
o Structure your site in a logical manner
o Avoid burying important content 4 or more folders deep in the hierarchy
o Create search engine friendly URLs
o Use canonical URLs
o Use the canonical tag to address duplicate content concerns
o Keep it clean!
2. Create Unique Content on your Product Pages – add to the vendor supplied product description copy that you are given. Every other site that sells the same product will also feature this content. The engines are looking to index useful, informative and unique content. Help them out by continuing to publish fresh and informative content. You will also receive the benefits of link value from other site and blogs that link to this content.
3. Use an SEO friendly CMS (Content Management System) – ensure that your CMS system allows you to populate unique title and meta tags and that you are able to add content as required.
4. Avoid Using Java Script in Navigation – while the engines are getting better at reading JS, they are still not there just yet. Make sure that the search engines can follow your links and avoid placing your main navigation (top nav, side nav, footer nav) in JS. Consider using CSS and include files as a way to create your site navigation. Again this is just SEO 101 best practice type of stuff.
5. Create and Update Your HTML Sitemaps – as you push out new content to the web make sure that you add it to your HTML sitemap
6. Create and Update XML Sitemaps – e-commerce sites tend to be very large. One way to ensure that your content is being crawled and indexed efficiently is to create and submit XML sitemaps. Using these sitemaps you can actually set the priority of which pages you consider to be the most important as related to other pages on your site. Communicate this to the search engines to ensure efficient indexing of your site.
7. Avoid hiding your content from the search engines – things like Flash, JS and frames might be useful from a design perspective but really they can wreak havoc from an SEO perspective. Help the engines find your content and make it easier for them to crawl and index.
I understand that to some of you this may be elementary SEO, but why oh why are so many sites neglecting these fundamental practices. If you are an e-commerce site and are currently having difficulty in gaining visibility in the major search engines, start with the basics. Trust me, if you have failed to address the fundamentals you will be limited in your ability to place well in the results. The longer your wait to address these issues the harder it is to overcome them. In case you have not yet noticed the Web is a hyper-competitive environment. Failure to address the fundamentals can most definitely have an impact on the bottom line that you generate from your online marketing efforts. Why restrict yourself? The need for fundamental SEO should be the first place you start when trying to optimize your web properties.
Source: ask.enquiro.com/
Strategies to increase backlinks
In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as Page Rank, are likely to be more important). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.
Backlinks is the key of success. But how should one increase backlinks and traffic naturally? To every webmaster, traffic is a must and should to survive in business. So, the webmasters spend each and every minute in increasing backlinks.
This article deals with the standard ways to increase backlinks so as to be in tune with the policies of search engine algorithms.
Firstly, articles are considered to be the premier source for backlinks of a website. Write unique articles, don’t just copy and paste the article from PLR sources. Select a niche and write informative articles keeping visitors in mind. Make the content unique. Target a keyword which has good demand but less supply. Concentrate on keyword phrases rather than 1 or 2 keywords as they are easy to target and effective.
Secondly, prepare a list of articles that has good PR and reader base. Get a unique title with keyword phrase in it. Don’t spam the article with your keywords. Be natural and add value to your niche. Be sure to add an author bio pointing a backlink to your website. Don’t pose yourself as the master in the niche. Try to be natural.
Thirdly, register in each article directory and keep a separate record of username and password. Then submit your article as per the category and write a brief description about your article. That’s it. Upon approval of your articles, you get the backlinks that too dofollow backlinks from the authority sites. Everything is good except that the whole process is just time taking one.
six Useful Internet Marketing Tools
Internet marketing is a must for online business. It is also known as web marketing, web site marketing, online marketing and e-marketing. Internet marketing uses the internet as a channel of introducing the company or seller’s identity and meeting the needs of potential customers. Millions of people around the world log on to the internet that eventually created cyber community and a target market for companies. In achieving this goal, there is a wide range of marketing strategies that you can use:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Copywriting: The process of copywriting is the same as to the print advertisement, but only the former is more in the use of online media. Even if your internet business does not involve selling, you still need a great copywriter to communicate your message. Remember, a website is your tool for communicating with your clients as well as vendors and suppliers. If you wish to sustain in your business, then you need to show them the value that only your internet business can provide.
Affiliate Marketing: Also known as associate marketing, affiliate marketing means teaming up with other sellers that will result in obtaining a commission from a purchased item or service.Marketing with internet affiliates are often mistaken with working with resale or resell rights. The latter actually gets all of the rights of the purchased product, earns you permission to resell it on your web page, and then gives you all of the earnings of the sold product. This is in contrary to affiliate marketing that only provides a commission.
Affiliate Marketing-Unlike resell rights, affiliate marketing gives you commission for every product sold through your referral. The advantage of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to purchase the product yourself. Also, you don’t need to worry about order processing and shipping.
E-Commerce: In the internet you can sell anything to anyone who is interested. In e-commerce, you basically put your whole store accessible for different people to order online.
Other software include self-help guides in internet advertisement, analysis on competitors’ web page links, list of affiliations and link exchange partners and many more.Free downloads such as software and ebooks of this revolutionary concept are available in the internet.
By Dan Martin. Source: onlineglobalbiz.com