Sunday, September 11, 2011

Optimizing Your E-Commerce Site for the Search Engines



Search engine optimization isn't as complicated as it sounds, especially not for sites that are build using the e-commerce standards. There is a misconception that sites that are e-commerce based are hard to optimize for the search engines. But, the truth is, they are no different. Once you start implementing the basic rules of SEO onto your website and see to it that you're building a strong foundation, there's absolutely no looking back. In the following article we shall be discussing how you can apply various SEO strategies to your e-commerce site and start driving traffic to it the free and easy way.

Being an e-commerce website owner, you should not overlook how important it is to optimize your website's graphics for the search engines. Your website will have graphics that can be used to get it ranked for certain targeted keywords. Insert your keywords into the alt tag of the images because search engines give a lot of importance to such tags. Every image that you upload to your website should have your keywords so that it's SEO focused. Besides that, you need to be as specific as possible with the keywords that you place in the ALT tag of the images. Be concise in your approach. This is because you obviously don't want to get blamed for keyword stuffing. This is why proper keyword research plays a big role in helping you find the right keywords to use on your website. Make sure you focus on it. It is crucial that you figure this out, for that reason grab some designer reading glasses so you can definitely zero in.

If you have loads of website pages on your site, then see which one of your e-commerce pages are a necessity. When you place more attention on certain pages, you can increase the page ranking of those pages in question. The pages that you do not want to get indexed should have a robot.txt added to them. Basically, this informs the search engines spiders that they do not have to spend time crawling these pages. By using this technique, the page rank for the pages that do not have robot.txt will quickly get a higher page rank.

Adding fresh content to your website is crucial part of getting ranked for your targeted keywords. But since your website is e-commerce based, and not content oriented, what can you do to make sure you have fresh content for your site? Allow your customers to post reviews! It's as simple as that. Your website should have a lot of products on it, if you are running any kind of e-commerce website. Let your customers supply reviews for products that they like or do not like. This will help you to get more conversions from your traffic, because the new people arriving on your site will see the many reviews that happy customers have given. You can relate to Amazon.com in this instance. Although it is an e-commerce website, there is always fresh material for the search engines because of customer reviews.

Preparing your e-commerce site for the search engines is just like doing it for other sites. When you begin using some of these tips to your advantage, you will see wonderful changes in terms of your website's rank. But it will not occur immediately. But, if you keep chugging along with it, you will witness positive results due to everything that you have put into it.



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