How to Optimize an Ecommerce Site

An e commerce site could have thousands upon thousands of pages of products. Just look at the online shopping giant Amazon; they probably have millions of product pages. E commerce sites that only sell one kind of product (cameras, shoes, furniture, etc) might have fewer pages overall, but by no means is it a small amount. On-site optimization is the process of going through you site, page by page, and tweaking each page so it is more search engine friendly. Many e-commerce sites fail to fully optimize their site mostly because of how large they are, but it still has to be done. It takes a lot of time, but it is almost always worth the effort.

Here are 3 ways you can better optimize your ecommerce site:

Create unique product descriptions
One of the biggest problems with many e-commerce sites is duplicate content. You might sell a lot of products that are very similar (or came from the same manufacturer) so the product descriptions are very formulaic and repetitive. For instance, a clothing retailer might describe one pair of pants as “Our boot cut jeans are designed to flatter your curves without losing their shape!” and the second style of pants as “Our wide legged trouser jeans are designed to flatter your curves without losing their shape!” It’s the same content, just the product changed. Each product page (boot cut jeans vs. wide legged trouser jeans) has its own URL; it needs unique content. Search engines are known to penalize sites they find guilty of duplicating content.

Simplify your internal linking structure
Most traffic doesn’t come to an e-commerce site through the homepage; they arrive via one of the product pages. You have to make it easy for them to navigate your site regardless of how they got there. You want to minimize the amount of clicks it takes your visitor to get from one page of your site to another. A drop down menu is a great way to help flatten your site structure. That way, if your visitor wants to jump from jeans to blouses, they don’t have to go all the way back to the homepage to do so.

Another way to simplify your linking structure is to recommend product pages to your visitor based on what product they are currently looking at. They might need a new purse to match the dress they are looking at, or maybe a pair of earrings. For instance, Amazon has a “customers who bought this item also bought” section. It’s a good way to keep visitors clicking through your site and filling up their cart.

Include customer reviews
Another major problem with e-commerce sites is that they don’t have a lot of content to begin with. Other than the product description, what else can you say? You need to give the search engines enough content to read so your site will get pulled to match more searches. One way to do this is to include consumer product reviews on the product page. This gives the search engines more content to read and also creates a 3rd party endorsement for your product. People are very social when it comes to shopping online. They want other people’s opinions before they buy. A real consumer review goes a long way in convincing someone to act.

How to- Get the Most Out of Facebook and Twitter Promotions

Once upon a time, you had to use a phone book to find a business’s contact details. Mercifully, those days are behind us. As social media has worked its way into every aspect of our lives, we as a culture have come to expect that our favorite brands — from “Big Gay Ice Cream” trucks to national airlines and fashion houses — are easily accessible on the most popular social networks.

However, it’s no longer enough to simply interact. Consumers are increasingly hungry for promotions, exclusive discounts and giveaways. In fact, recent data suggests that most people who follow brands on Facebook and Twitter both expect and want to receive coupons from these brands.

According to an Ad Age/Ipsos Observer survey of 1,000 participants regarding digital consumption habits, 65% of consumers want the brands they follow to offer coupons. Compare this figure to the percentage of respondents who said they wanted enhanced customer service (42%) and you begin to get a clearer picture of the landscape.

Certainly the Ad Age numbers indicate that the demand for promotions exists, but how effective are Twitter andFacebook promotions in practice? Do they really increase engagement or sales? While no conclusive studies have been done on this exact topic, substantial anecdotal evidence suggests that they do.

The Role SEO Plays for Your Online Business

When it comes to e-commerce, operating and concentrating on the improvement of the website is more or less meaningless if no one on the internet knows that you exist on cyberspace. This is why promotion and marketing are at the heart of e-commerce.

Even the best brands on the internet cannot perform well if they do not keep up their efforts to promote their websites and the product and services they are offering, apart from the activities related to a business. As the consumers are exploring all the shopping options while sitting at home, this rather invites them to take more liberties with their choice and to explore the options, which perhaps they would not have had they been visiting a store in the local market.

That is very much how convenient life has become for an online consumer, and this convenience has only made the competition even fiercer. Even these top brands employ all the SEO techniques to make their websites rank better in the pages for the search engine results for particular keywords, related to their business. If these SEO tools and techniques do work in their favor, it offers them with an immense competitive advantage. But such a certain advantage can only be attained if businesses take timely measures and consult with top-notch SEO services in how to optimize their websites and content for better search engine result rankings.

A SEO service is a team of experts at optimizing websites and their content for a better reach across the audiences active on the internet. The reason why such a service and the concept of SEO itself work so well is that the potential customers narrow down the search themselves by looking up certain keywords. The search engine mechanism presents all the best related sites as a search result within a couple of seconds. A SEO service can use that very mechanism to optimize your website to get your better ranks and more customers.

Local SEM Has Changed, Have You Noticed?

Local SEM or search engine marketing got you confused lately? Things are certainly not the same as they were 2 or 3 years ago? The local search marketing game is changing folks and technology can be blamed on that. Chances are in the next three years it will change even more so don’t get too mad. Just hop on the horse and try to hold on.

Let’s take a look at how the local SEM game has changed over the years:

Local SEM Change#1 – Blogs
Blogs have been around for a number of years but I still see many website owners trying to market themselves locally that still do not understand the concept of a blog. A blog is nothing more than a journal entry of your choice that adds a whole new page to your website. You can structure that post as you wish and with a little savviness that blog post can rank for a variety of search terms in the industry.

Local SEM Change#2 – Social Media
Now wasn’t this a wrench in the gears for some? Who would have thought that communicating on a local level with your audience in front of your computer would make things so difficult for some businesses. It’s still cheaper than a newspaper ad but when you have been doing print advertising for a better part of your life it is tough to walk away from it for some. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks right?

Local SEM Change#3 – Check In Technology
Hold onto your hat folks because this one might make your head spin. You walk into a Starbucks and you click a button to tell everyone you have checked in and now you have a mayor badge? What badge? To make things even worse for some businesses Facebook has stepped into to join the fun with the location check in technology which is going to downright give some business owners a head ache.

Don’t be scared but rather embrace the new changes and find a way to get involved with the new technologies related to your local SEM campaign. Waiting and hoping things will change is never going to happen.

Google Launches Attack On Spam Sites & Content Farms

After receiving a lot of crtisism, over the past few months, regarding the quality of its search content Google has finally decided its time to look into this problem and fix it.

Earlier this week Google announced that they realized that the detoriating quality of search content on its search result page were posing a serious threat to the reputation of the company and that they will be taking action againts spammers.
Matt Cutts said in an interview that the spam content on the English result pages are less than half of what it was five years ago but they have noticed a small but significant rise of spam over the past few months. This certainly correlates with the feedback we recently got back from you, our readers.
Here is Matt’s view of the issue:

Google has been thinking for quite some time about how to deal with content that isn’t obvious spam but is clearly not designed with the best interests of the user in mind. Google needs to be open to ways where we can improve.
Cutts also stated that his team was already on the job and that some changes will be made in the search algorithms to specifically tackle the recent increase in spam results that are showing up on the search result pages.
According to Matt, after the launch of their a new version of Google Caffeine, Google has been indexing a lot more content that include spam and to deal with the spam content they have recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for on-page spam content to rank highly.

The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spam words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.

Apparently, Google has also been developing its hacked site detecting ability and is testing some new changes, including one that penalizes websites for copying the content of others without having original content of its own. Sounds pretty good to me!
Google hasn’t forgotten about content farms either – they are firmly in their sights in 2011. Google has introduced two changes in its search algorithm that will block the low-quality sites from showing up with high rankings on the SERPs.

It would appear that Google isn’t going to let anything stand between it and search quality, even if that means taking down thousands of spammers and content farms in the process.

Introduction to Search Engine Marketing and Online Advertising

A search engine helps users find the things they're looking for online. The user types a word or phrase, called a query, into the search engine, which then displays a set of results that are relevant to the query.

Most search engines provide two types of results listings in response to the same user query: organic (also called "natural" or "free") listings, and paid listings (i.e., advertisements). Google keeps these two types of listings separate, and ads are noted by the phrase "Sponsored Links" appearing above them.

Most search engines rank the results within each type of listing -- in other words, they determine in what order to show the listings on the results page -- according to how relevant the result is to the user's query, with the most relevant appearing at the top of the page.

Each search engine calculates relevancy in a different way for each type of result (organic and paid). This is one of the main differences between one search engine and another, and it's a factor in many users' decisions about which search engine to use.

On Google, although both organic and paid results appear in response to the same user query, the results are independent of each other. The ranking of an organic search result has no bearing on the ranking of any ads, and vice versa. This makes it possible for an advertiser to perform well in the paid listings and have an ample online presence, even if their site isn't present in the top organic search results.

In Google's organic results, relevancy to the user's query is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link from site A to a page on site B adds to site B's PageRank.

Google AdWords also uses a combination of factors to rank paid listings, which will be explained in depth later in this lesson.

By(Google.Com) SEOMotion.In

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