By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)
Let’s say that you’ve decided to start an e-commerce site, selling pet products online. Your shop has been online for a few months now, and you are still struggling to get noticed by online shoppers. This is a fairly common feeling among new e-commerce businesses, and when it comes, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often overlooked as a solution. This is perhaps because the average person feels that SEO is too complicated for them to participate in, or they feel lost trying to find a proper SEO solutions company to complete the task for them. However, I would like to argue that there are many easy fixes in SEO that can be completed in just a few minutes and that do not require highly technical skill or understanding of SEO principles.
Try these steps in our SEO Makeover to help your site get a quick boost of traffic:
1. Keyword Research:
Before beginning to build and market your website, you should have done a quick keyword research to see what key terms and phrases you should focus on in your marketing strategy. If you have not done this already, do it now! Simply visit a keyword research tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This will allow you to put in keyword that you think would work for your site and niche (e.g. pet products, pet food, discount pet products, etc). The tool will then rank those keywords according to search volume and will even give you suggested synonyms to use for your site.
Here’s something to keep in mind when researching keywords: the top keywords in a niche are extremely difficult to tap into. For example, with the pet store example, you should not focus all your energy on marketing the phrase “pet products,” because this will be dominated by companies with much more time and resources available than you to market these words, for example Petco and PetSmart. The lessen here is to market key words and phrases that are relevant, relatively popular, and that can apply uniquely to your site, for example, designer doggie clothes, (if that’s what you would like to sell, of course!)
2. Title and Meta Tags:
The meta and title tags of your website dictate how a search engine will catalog your page. Therefore, you will need to use the keywords that you just researched to describe your different web pages and blog posts. There are many tools that can help you with this, but it depends on what type of server is hosting your site and if you are using a platform like Wordpress. Simply look in your hosting account for the option to change the title tags and meta tags of your website. This is the next step in getting your site out there for the world to see!
3. Free Website Submission:
When a website is new, it can take time for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to notice that they exist. This is also true when a website is redesigned dramatically-the search engine loses all information that was previously indexed on the page. In order to alleviate the time it takes for Google to index your site, you should use a free website submission service to get the ball rolling. This is just like it sounds: the free website submission will submit your website URL to hundreds of search engines and indexing services. Try our free website submission tool now to get started!
Hopefully this post has been helpful in teaching those who may have been intimidated by the complexity of SEO in the past to be able to improve their search engine rankings by themselves. Be sure to check back in the future for more tips and tricks!
The photo of the tools is from Flickr and is the copyright of ELF cosmetics.