SEO: Back to Basics

Now on the back end of the year, it’s time to start optimizing your site for the holidays. We thought we’d revisit some SEO basics to make sure your site is prepared, since it can take 3-6 months to rank for some keywords.

So, product in hand, let’s get it ranked #1 on Google™.

1. Keyword Research – How will people find your product? Use the free Google™ tool for all the keyword research you’ll need. Try to find keywords meeting these criteria:
   • buyers further along in the buying process
   • high search volume
   • low competition

   How do you find these terms? Let’s say you have a dancewear site. Try ranking for terms like ‘camisole leotard’ as opposed to “dancewear” or “leotard”. The latter terms get lots of searches, but are highly competitive and don’t do a very good job of targeting the user in the buying process, as they may just be doing research on leotards or looking for the definition of leotard. “Camisole Leotard” supposes a user has a specific idea of what they’re looking for in a leotard, and indicates that they may be looking for one to buy. Additionally, “Camisole Leotard” gets a fair amount of domestic searches per month (about 6,600), and has relatively low competition. When we put “camisole leotard” (with the quotes) in to google’s search bar, we saw there were about 51,800 pages with that keyword phrase in it. That’s not very much competition.

2. Build the text- Once you have your keywords in hand (about 5-6 for a page), build relevant text on your page. The current thinking is that search engines favor readability more than they do occurrences of the keyword (given good link building — more on that later), so make sure your customers can read it well. Add a main keyword (your top pick of the group) to your Product Name, and add them all to the short and long description. Remember that text nearer the top of the page gets more oomph by Google™, so put them as high as possible.
3. Build those links! – You have all probably heard the “click here” story, but for those who haven’t I will recount. Adobe Reader ranks #1 for the phrase “click here”, even though those words don’t appear at all on their page. To boot, there are over 2 Trillion competing pages. How is this possible? Link building. There are hundreds of thousands of people linking to Adobe so that they can help their customers download the reader. Any time someone links to the reader they use the anchor text “click here” in their link.

   This example illustrates the importance of back linking. You need to link to your site using the keywords you want as anchor text. That’s the important part–backlinking will not help you rise to the top of the search engines, unless you are using your keywords as anchor text. In our leotards example, we’d do something like this: Camisole Leotards or, for a code view: < a href="www.ourdancestore.com/camisole-leotards.aspx">Camisole Leotards< /a >

   Good ways to get backlinks:

   • Give thoughtful comments on industry blogs & forums. But, be sure the resulting comments posted don’t have rel=”no follow”, otherwise it’ll do you no good. You can find this out by looking at a comment and right clicking your mouse. Select ‘view source’ and you’ll be able to see the page code.
   • Submit articles with backlinks to Ezines, Squidoo, and Helppages.com. Issue press releases to PRWeb. Submit your site to directories like Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, Best of the Web.
   • Create a blog and use the posts to link back to your ecommerce site