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.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

It is too often the case that when starting a paid search marketing campaign, people tend to lose sight of the main point.  What’s the main point, you ask?  To get people to click, right?  Wrong.

Yes, it’s true that Pay-Per-Click ads provide quality leads most of the time.  However, no matter how interested the “clicker” is in your products, services or niche, if your site is poorly designed or organized, your marketing would have been in vain.  There is no point marketing a site that is difficult to use, messy, or otherwise messed up!

Make sure that your PPC ads are really being effective by testing your site for usability, attractiveness, etc.  There are hundreds of free and low-cost tools for this purpose!

Here are some online tools to test the quality of your site:

1. Five Second Test: With this nifty tools, website owners can upload a screen-shot of their landing page which will then be viewed by users for five seconds.  There are two different versions of the service, one where the viewers view your photo, then list everything they can remember from it.  The second is a click test, where the viewers click on the areas they find most prominent or interesting.  This tool can really help you test how first-time viewers are seeing your landing page.  Then you can cater the page around those findings to make your ads more effective!

2.  Website Grader: Website Grader is a simple and effective website tester tool.  Once your site is entered in, Grader will measure your site’s marketing power through SEO statistics, traffic and marketing strategies.  Once finished, they will even give you tips to improve the areas where you may be lacking.  This is a great tool for those “less-expert” of us in the field of development and marketing.

3.  Google Analytics: Without fail, Google Analytics has proven to be one of the most powerful marketing research tools.  Easy enough for beginning users, but with tons of extras and plugins for experts, it suits most online marketing levels.  On top of all this, it’s free!

To capitalize on all of your internet marketing campaigns, use free tools like these to see how people are viewing your site.  This will greatly increase the productivity of your PPC ads, SEO strategies and social media marketing.

By Robert Lockard

It looks like two Davids are joining forces to take on Goliath. After years of public wrangling over the details, Microsoft and Yahoo finally announced a proposed 10-year partnership between their search-engine and online-advertising departments on Wednesday, July 29, 2009.

“In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers,” the official Microsoft news release said.

The way I read that sentence, it means they will pool their resources so that Yahoo’s search engine will have the same tools as the Bing “decision engine.” It also means Bing will have access to Yahoo’s superior online advertising services and it can give advertisers better results and a bigger audience.

Right now, Google controls about 70 percent of the online-search market, while Microsoft and Yahoo, combined, only account for nearly 30 percent of all Internet searches. They’ll need a lot more stones in their sling if they hope to take down the giant.

What does this new relationship mean for pay-per-click advertisers? According to the news release,

Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

Advertisers will be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s online-advertising tools while also receiving Yahoo’s expert service. This new service will hopefully offer the best of both worlds.

“Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, referring to Google.

Of course, companies and their CEOs want to promote their services as much as possible. Google probably has a completely different take on these events. So what are your thoughts? Is this development good or bad for ecommerce and Internet marketing? This is a complete version of the blog post on the eHarbor Blog: “What the Microsoft-Yahoo merger means for ecommerce.”

The Microsoft-Yahoo logo is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of JVManna.