Search Engine Optimisation

E-commerce SEO is something of a hardship for many, long hours more often than not leading to little if any reward and return on investment. However marketing your e-commerce site correctly and making a few minor changes to your site / coding and you will soon see your ROI improve by a huge margin.

1. Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions – we all know it’s so tempting to copy and paste what you are given from the distributor or from some other website but don’t! If you really can’t think of anything to write at least rewrite the text enough to make it unique … but make sure it still flows and isn’t full of jargon! – Product descriptions should compel the user to want to buy your product.
2. SEO Friendly URL’s –  although not always easy to implement having user and machine friendly url’s can make the difference between someone remembering your site (or linking to it) or not. Either way this can mean you get a sale or conversion of some kind or not! – and if you really must pass parameters in the URL ensure that they are at the end and it doesn’t effect browsing if they are missed off!
3. Create a product RSS feed – so your a website owner/manager or just someone who’s used the internet and you think an RSS feed is just the subscription to your favourite blog … well you are wrong. An RSS feed is simply an XML script which can contain anything from latest blog posts on SEO to a product feed, including images and links! (then go and submit the feed to Google Base).
4. Tag your products – With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
5. Link within product descriptions - Create keyword heavy links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
   NB: make these absolute aka use http://
6. Don’t use “view” and “more” type links - ok, so that has your attention you wondering what you should use… well the answer is I lied do use them they are expected and you are there to feed but also defy expectation of your user … everyone has these and so should you but go further make sure any images link to the product page as with the title of the product!  - all links should also include title tags.
7. Optimise your images - if you can make the file size small without destroying quality do so – every second spent loading your site is a second wasted and second you are closer to loosing a conversion! Also include alt tags to all images these are vital for search engines… after all this is how they index them.
8. Embed User Tracking - tracking your user is easy with cookies and javascript – do a quick search and you will find many tools that can record what your users are doing and where they click … or if you don’t want all that trouble use Google Analytics and after a while view the overlap map to see what people have been clicking. Also keep tabs on your statistics, but don’t expect miracles remember SEO is a journey and not a destination!
9. Don’t Use Flash (ahhhhhh saviour of the universe NOT!) - most search engines have no capability to index flash, google and yahoo have little but more often than not don’t pass the first thing they see (meaning they don’t click the links!). With this in mind keep flash to a minimum and definitely don’t use it for your primary navigation.
10. Make Checkout Simple – many people using the internet will trust paypal and google checkout but linking across to them sometimes makes users feel unsafe and insecure, using integration to your site such that the user doesn’t leave your site keeps these people a little happier. Further to this keep checkout to a minimum don’t force users to register to use your checkout, have a guest checkout and if you can keep checkout to 2 or less pages… who wants to go through 5 pages before you have a confirmed purchase… and with mobile internet growing rapidly a single page checkout means a single load and users are more likely to convert.

All fairly simple ideas as you can see but each one will bring you closer and closer to success and those huge conversion numbers you are driving for, not just one or two a week! (if your lucky)

Finally if you are wanting a cheaper gateway than google and paypal can offer then hop over to Crystals Merchant Services and ask about the online gateway system we can offer. Going further if you own a shop or two also ask about the reduced merchant service costings and rates on credit and debit card terminals.

On Thursday I posted the second part of my SEO Tips (meta tags) . This is the third blog in this series about SEO, and I hope by the end I will have covered most of the bases, though clearly not all! as they are ever changing and I like to keep some secrets for my consultation clients (as premium content). There will be several appendices of this series following in short suit of this blog.

After my recent postings I have been approached by several people asking about accessibility and how does it link to SEO, as they don’t quite understand what I meant when I said this in my first blog that they go hand-in-hand. 
By hand-in-hand I mean that if you make a site accessible (as per the content) then you will make the site accessible to Search Engines (SE’s). This will mean content easy to read, follow, and be read aloud, it will mean images have alt-tags and that links will have title tags and meaningful keywords attached (not click here!). This also helps because if people can get access to your site they are more likely to not only recommend your site but maybe become a client. Hope that clears it up, and also reasons to make a site accessible. Also there will be a blog series on accessibility soon

More for your internal workings

URL’s - SEO friendly URL’s are helpful for (believe it or not as the name suggests) SE’s. This is where the likes of index.php?page=1&model=2 becomes /pagetitle/modelname. From this it is clear to see how it helps SE’s because you now have a more descriptive URL for your pages. But how to do this. Well if you have wordpress, there is setting for this. If not research .htaccess files and in particular mod_rewrite functions, they are quite easy once you get used to them. 

If you can’t use .htaccess for whatever reason simply use directly relate directory names and file names, not useless rubbish like page1.html instead use aboutcars.html etc.

Sitemaps - This is a fantastic tool for showing google what is on your site and where. You need to submit them to google and other SE’s for the best results. a simple search on google for sitemaps will bring up automatic generators if you cant make one yourself. though be careful some give the same priority to all pages, not the best of ideas.

So moving on to todays topic External Opportunities

Link Building – This in general is one of the more important features of SEO work, getting a site “good, reliable and continual growth links” is very hard work, but the more you get of these links the more SE’s will rank you. If you get recommended by a website (for example BoagWorld, TWiT or Silicon [for web industry people]) SE’s will take you more seriously and rank you better than if you, say, just have links from your friends unrelated site, the same applies to blogs. A good way to make these links is to offer a link exchange, though only do this with relevant sites, even offer to just have their link on for a while. 
If a site has a forum, talk in there, comment wisely but do not blatantly plug your website. build a reputation for being a good person and company then link, they will ban you for spamming, if you do spam! and you will instinctively if your not careful.
Finally remember these are references, almost as good as word of mouth, have a good reference and a visitor to a site becomes a client of your company.
Further to this it is important to know that you are better to have a link from one site with a page rank of 5 or above than several with a rank of 1.

Social Bookmarking / Networking – Although not as important for most sites, SB/SN is something that is become more and more important as the Internet continues to grow at a hugely under-estimated rate. If a site is Dugg (by digg.com), Stumbled (by stumbleupon.com), Red (by reddit) or Flurked (by flurk.net*), on a regular basis it will grow a ranking within these communities and more people will visit, your site will get known for being a great site and highly recommended by Internet users. However again these sites are tough on spam. Getting friends to help is a good way to avoid being seen as a spammer, the server see’s a new ip and knows its not you (or should i say thinks)….proxy is another way but this is black hat so i don’t suggest it.
Further to the above sites that allow microblogging such as TWITTER (twitter.com/andykinsey) allow for blatant spamming, but if you are good, update a few times a day or week you will gain momentum and following (like a blog) and people will follow you and visit your recommended sites. Just looking at some of my recent twitters i should really stop blatant self promotion, but i wont because i know SE’s like these sites (twitter and SN’s).

Word of Mouth – this is the most important part of any SEO effort, believe it or not. If your site is recommend by a person by talking it will stick in the human brain more than if you just get linked to a site, its why podcasts do so well (in general). Talking is a great tool, so use it, go to meet ups for your industry make friends with everyone and become the envy of everyone as you get their work. more to come on network meetings soon.

Business Cards - This is one of the final/first chances you will have to make an impression, good business cards sell you and everything about you and your company. Having a good business card is a key weapon in beating your competition.

Finally – (well almost) – ensure you submit your sites to every directory and search engine you can (beware some cost money like yahoo directory, but their SE is free). 

In Summary

so heres what you have been waiting for… the overall summary, and i can finally release myself from my blog writing for this series, at least until your questions pile in again to admin*at*andykinsey.com
Andys SEO tips are:

• Look after your meta data, and it will look after your site.
• Refresh your content (both on your pages and your meta data)  regularly.
• Keep clean code, google will only read upto 40% of your pages at once (it is thought) so make the most of it.
• Use Sitmaps and SEO URL’s
• Avoid link farms at ALL costs.
• Submit sites to all SE’s and directories
• Link Exchange to the bigger websites in your industry
• Gain a reputation via forums, and social networks, but do not spam (ask friends to help).
• Most importantly – Make your site accessible and SE’s rankings will show favour to you.