Practical Ecommerce Web Marketing

In this article, I will focus on technical aspects of link building, while in the second part, I will show you real examples, tactics, and places to find links. PART 1 is more for newbies, while PART 2 is for those who already understand the techniucal aspects and need fresh ideas for planting and growing links (not on a link-farm, mind you).

WARNING!  Before I tell you how to build links to your ecommerce site, let me tell you how not you.  Not only because it is less liekly to work, but because going any other route is akin to sending out SPAM; a lot of people won’t like you, you will clutter up the web, and rarely works in the long run. 

As Eric Ward says ”anyone can Google Map a sewage plant.”  Too many online store owners I speak with ar looking for an EASY button, for an ecommerce site that has little or no value other than in the generic products it carries.  Remeber that if it is too easy, then too many people are probably already doing it, and unless you are selling something completely new and different, you may have a tough time promoting your site in any way (not just SEO).  Besides, the search engines are always trying to improve what they think is relevant for the people searching on the serach engines, so in a sense, they always try to make it harder for us to manipulate them in a sense. This applies to well established sites as well as those who want to open an online store for the first time.

Building links from other websites (a.k.a. backlinks) for ecommerce sites is tough stuff at times, especially if you are trying to be the next Amazon.com.  Why?  Because if you are selling the same thing as the next guy, why would people link to your website on their own?  Your unique selling point can be a huge draw for gettings links to your site naturally, or with effort on your part, but the point is, if you think link building is easy for a site that sells shoes, then your in trouble, unless:

A:  Your shoes, or the way to deliver your shoes, are distinctily different.
B:  You can write content about shoes, or shoe niche, that is distinctly different.

Now that I have told you what link building isn’t, let me tell you what it is:

Basic guidelines for building high quality links

This list is roughly in order of most to least important, so stop reading when you have has your fill.

There’s a lot of nitty gritty detail on how to get good links, but generally speaking it often boils down to this

The higher the other site ranks for related terms, the better it is to try to get a link from them. For a simple example, if you are looking to get ranked high for the term classic 57 chevy’s, then maybe you can find a high ranking directory by searching on Google/Yahoo/MSN using something like: 57 chevy’s directory

Reciprocal links are dead

(e.g. If I link to you, you link back to me). Focus on one-way links. Reciprocal links are promoted by bad SEO companies, and used to death by uninformed website owners . Reciprocal links are not completely useless though, and may be useful for driving relevant traffic between sites, but don’t rely on them heavily for good rankings. Here is the problem with reciprocal links: Let’s say a link goes from site A over to site B; then a link is placed on site B pointing back to site A. Here’s what you have: A > B > A. Now, let’s repeat this strategy with a bunch of other websites, since I got a lot of friends with websites. If we did this a lot, and then drew a picture of how the sites were linked together, it would look like a daisy. The search engines see right through this. I know what you are thinking. Even 3-way trades aren’t gonna help you much (A >B > C > A), and could even hurt you if used too much.

Get links from relevant sites and pages

If you have a site about classic cars, and are trying to get a link from a site about alien kittens, think again. More relevance = better. You’d be much better off getting a link from, say a site about hubcaps or something related to classic cars.

Use proper anchor text (not always)

The links should use the keyword in the link text, or anchor text. Simply put, a link should look like this: “hot classic cars“, and not “click here to see hot classic cars”. As you can see, I have the actual keywords in the link itself. Also switch it up a LOT. Using the same phrases over and over spells disaster. Don’t worry if all your links dont have keywords in them. You are less likely to control the anchor text on a quality site anyways.

Using PageRank to recognize worthless pages

Getting a link from a web page with 0 PageRank is often an indicator of trust to some degree.  Generally speaking, higher PageRank is better, but again, relevance and trust is more important than PageRank*.  Use the Google toolbar, or one of these plugins to see Pagerank: SearchStatus (shows on page you are visiting), Firefox plugins: SEO for Firefox (shows in Google results). Links from link farms, or lots of sites with PageRank can spell disaster. I also like SEOinc’s free SEO toolbar for quick digging of info such as backlinks, ranking checker, etc… for Internet Explorer

Get links from trusted sites/pages

High trust sites are not like finding sites with high PageRank, but in a nutshell, older sites, with lots of inbound and few outbound links tend to have higer trust. .edu and .gov sites often fit this criteria which is why sometimes they are sought after. There are various free tools online for find such sites through link hubs. this almost means avoiding spammy, low-quality, link-farm sites. Also get them from new sites. Remember, the point is to mix it up. Even for the sake that a new site can eventually become popular and highly valuable to you in the long run.

Deep link

Don’t think that all links should point to your home page. Get highly relevant links to specific pages within your site, specific to those pages.  The more targeted the better.  E.g. getting a link from a page on a website that talks about various hubcaps from a 57 chevy, which links to a page on your website that talks specifically about the same thing.

Think, complimentary

Obviously you will generally be getting links from sites that are complementary and not competative.

Remeber, human vistors are real people too

Alexa.com and Compete.com rankings can also find sites with high traffic (maybe not high search engine rankings).  You can’t forget about real people you know.  Not only for the direct traffic, but when people find your site, they may link to it too.  Heres a site that combines Alexa, Compete, etc… results

Recognize the NOFOLLOW tag, and realize its importance

Getting links from sites that have rel=”nofollow” in the code will not help your search engine rankings. Learn more about the nofollow tag here. You can look at the source code of a webpage usually to find out, or use a Firefox extension such as the SearchStatus or NoDoFollow plugins.

Track your results

Go to Yahoo search and type link:yourdomain.com This works for Google too, but Google only shows a few of your back links, unless you are using their webmaster tools.  Again, the SEOBook toolbar and SEOinc toolbar mentioned above can help you do this quikly.

Build links slowly over time

Getting 50 links a day from day 1 looks suspicious to search engines. SEO takes time. Of course, if you get that kind of linkage naturally cause your site rocks, thats okay.

Avoid other bad practices

Examples include: Lots of links from a group of websites owned by yourself, or a couple people is not helpful (same C-class). Sites that are considered low-trust or spammy in the search engine eyes such as link farms.

ALWAYS mix it up

There are a million ways to get links. Think beyond the common practices: directories, article submission, social media, and ALWAYS mix it up. Otherwise, you may shoot yourself in the foot. This even means getting links from sites with PR 0. Focus on relevance! A 100 links all from directories is probably a waste of time if you have very few other types of links.

Natural links are the best

If you can create content and a site that causes people to want to link to it on your own, then you are done. I have done it. It wasn’t cheap. Most often, the best links are links that grow on their own. That is, when people find your site and think, “mmmm… I like this site, so I am going to link to it on my blog.“

Paid links is a mixed bag

One of the more grey areas, but if Google finds out, it will basically discredit those backlinks to your site. However, it’s fast and easy. Even if it looks like the page sells links, your link may be seen along side those. Paid directories are definitely more acceptable.

Long term

The longer you have a link to your site from another website, the better.

 

 PART 2 of this guide coming soon!

It will focus on some practical ideas for finding places to get links from.  Stay tuned

*This is my opinion. Some things in SEO are more cut and dry than others, and this is not one of them. I won’t always say when I state something that is not always agreed upon, so just be aware of that. I mention this simply because my audience is not deeply trained on SEO for the most part, and you can’t just believe everything you read online.

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Basic instructions for constructing a link for newbies (if you are not using a program like Dreamweavaer/Expressionweb/CMS that does this for you). Ignore hte line breaks as they are not important/needed:

Here is an example link that I want to make:

Check out my favorite 
search engine

And here is the HTML code:

Check out my favorite
<a href="http://google.com">search engine</a>

The link goes to Google.com. The anchor text is “search engine”. If I need to tell search engines not to give the link credit, I might also add a nofollow tag like this:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http//www.google.com">
search engine</a>

Oh, and one more technical tip, always use the same version of the link to your pages, such as this example: http://www.example.com is seen slightly different than http://example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html They each take you to the same page, but search engines have trouble with this a bit, so pick one and stick with it.

Overview:

The focus of this ONLINE STORE MARKETING 101 article is to help you write content for articles and blogs that is search engine optimized, with a focus on the fundamentals. It is not an attempt to teach you every last detail about SEO for content creation. It assumes you have researched your keywords well already.

Goals:

The point is to make a unique page on your site/blog for each of your most important keywords that have real value to someone that might read them—not just search engines; even if it’s not totally original and profound writing. If you can write cutting edge, compelling stuff, that’s even better as it will attract people to link to those articles.

Real people will find and read these, so don’t put out garbage since that helps no one. Of course, the more interesting it is, the more likely that a visitor will stay on your website when they find that page too.

This is not a rush job, but I would suggest making a commitment to write at least one article a week till you have a couple dozen of them to start out with.  If you can, become the expert in your niche, force yourself to know more than anyone, and be a leader of valuable fresh content in your industry.

Steps:

When making these pages, there are three things to focus on:

• keyword proximity
• keyword density
• keyword cross-linking
• keyword targeting

Keyword Proximity:

Basically, the rule is that the early on the keyword appears the better. Don’t go overboard, and make really weird sentences/phrases. But your keyword phrase should be found in all locations of the page including:

• The file name
• the TITLE of the page (usually the name of the article)
• the META description & keywords
• the main heading of the article, which should be a H1 tag usually
• and equally important, within the body of the content

What proximity means is that it appears as early as possible in any of these elements. For example the title, “Mortgage Leads You Can Count on” is better than “You can count on our Mortgage leads” since “Mortgage Leads” appears at the beginning of the title. The same is true for the others as well (META tags, heading, content). It’s not always feasible, but do what you can, when you can.

The file name shouldn’t be incredibly long either. Maybe 3 or 4 words tops is ideal (separated by hyphens, and not underscores or spaces).

Keyword Density:

Your keyword phrase should appear a few times throughout the content. Ideally, somewhere between 5% and 12% of the total content of the page; in other words, if your article that you wrote has 100 words, and your target keyword phrase “Utah mortgage leads” occurs twice within that content, then that represents 6 words out of 100, or a 6% keyword density. Longer pages need lower keyword density, and you should have at least a couple hundred words per article. You can even research your competitors since keyword density varies per industry and search engine.

Cross-linking:

While writing articles, think how to build natural links across to highly related (or thematically related) articles, including other sections/areas of your site. Let’s say you have a sentence like “we have the best mortgage leads on the planet” You would want to link the phrase “mortgage leads” to your main mortgage leads overview page (assuming you have one) not only because the keyword is exact match, but the site visitor may see that and think “hey, I will click on that and check out these leads.” Cross linking helps site visitors, and search engines to rank your site better for the words you use in the links.

Warning: something like “click here to go to my homepage” is a big no-no. Not only are people smarter than that, but it will only help you if you are trying to get your site ranked high for “click here.”

Maybe even for simplicity’s sake, you could do something like “Related Articles” at the bottom of each page, then link a few related articles.

Careful Targeting:

You can only target one keyword phrase per page—do not try to focus on 2 different phrases on a single page.

You can also use variations on the same phrase (like a plural version) or the words in a different order; sometimes even a synonym is okay too. This are is a bit gray area since for example the word “MLM” (multi-level-marketing) is just another name for “network marketing ” or perhaps even “home based business.” Search engines sometimes understand these as the same, but I wouldn’t count on it just yet.  What about “shopping cart” and “shopping cart software“?  Might those be considered the same by some search engines?

One thing I do us use “tags” at the bottom of the article that are basically other very similar keywords that someone might use to try to find this article. The tags won’t have a lot of power on their own, but in combination with other words in the article, it helps. Don’t try to fool search engines or real people by putting lots of useless, and less relevant tags on the page. The more you dilute it with unrelated stuff, the less power your page has as a whole, and the more likely your site will be penalized for spamming. I don’t want to scare anyone except for those that are thinking about stretching this principle or any others beyond the natural.

Summary

• Great content = great search engine traffic and real visitors.
• When you are writing, think about how early it appears in each of the elements. (proximity)
• Make sure the keyword appears more than once in the article (density)
• When you are done, think about how you can link your articles together to help people and search engines.
• Be careful to target your words properly, and make relevant tags if needed.

You can use a free blogging platform like Blogger (not really very customizable, but super easy to setup), or WordPress (you may need help to install on your own hosting account, but more customizable). In fact, this blog uses Wordpress.

If you do promote links to your website form other websites, you can even promote them to link to link to these specific pages even (so don’t ever move pages on your site if you don’t need to). There’s a lot more to it than that when it comes to linking, but I will save that for another day.

Or in other words, how this site/page can help you best. Maybe this doesn’t sound 100% on topic to this blog, but the reason this is my first article is because I want you to subscribe to my blog in the coolest way possible.

I am always surprised by how many people I run into all the time that are still like “what is RSS ?” And at the same time, so many websites make it difficult to understand. You could just bookmark this page, but how are you going to know when it gets updated with a new article/post? You see, using RSS gives you a lot more power to keep track of things, and maybe even have your reader notify you via email or a pop-up in your computer’s system tray (depending on the reader you are using). Using RSS is very cool and hard to avoid on the web these days–and ultimately it could make your life a tad easier.

How it helps you: Instead of running all over the web for news, updates, etc… you can have the web come to you. It’s sort of your own personal news service. Let’s say, you like to read the New York Times, business section, and you also like to read about high performance car articles from Car and Driver Magazine. Additionally, you like to read a few blogs out there that you are a fan of. So, you just go to your RSS reader, and then you would see all updates from all of those different sites, all on your single page–you see, it’s your own portal to the web. Readers in Internet Explorer and Firefox look just like your bookmarks, except they now update on their own, whenever new info is available.

Here is a screenshot of the RSS reader in Firefox (it’s there by default, no setup required):

As you can see in this example, my bookmarks show the latest news, automatically. If I click on any of those bookmarks, then I will end up at the site so that I can read the full news article.

As you can see, it’s very time sensitive, or time oriented information that RSS really is used for the most. But even sites like Ebay and Amazon often let you subscribe to RSS feeds to watch certain products and product updates.

But how do you setup an RSS reader, or should I say subscribe to an RSS feed ? It’s easy even for most people that are afraid of the internet and other crazy technologies.

If you use Internet Explorer (the blue “E”) to get online and browse the internet, then you can read it here on Microsoft’s website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/tour/rss/
In short, any site you are visiting, you should see a little orange symbol in your browsers toolbar somewhere.

If you use Firefox, then try this to get started (they call theirs “Live Bookmarks”):
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html

Most email clients/programs like Outlook (2007), Eudora, and Thunderbird have readers built into them (use their documentation to learn how).

If you use Google Desktop, there is one there that even notifies you, or even your Google/MSN/Yahoo homepage can all be customized to show RSS feeds too–as you can see, plenty of options.

There are also plenty of other free (and commercial) programs out there–unavoidable these days. You can do a Google search, or a search on Download.com for “RSS reader” or “RSS aggregator” or “news aggregator.” But I would really count on most of the ones I mentioned previously, especially the ones that can auto-notify you.

Now, in another blog entry, I will talk about how to setup your own RSS for your own website and such. IF you run a blog using Blogger or any other blogging tool, you will see that it is already built in and ready to go.