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.

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.

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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.

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There are as many ways to increase a website’s conversion rate as there are ways to design a website. These are probably some of the most fundamental, and easy to change aspects of most sites, with the best ROI. So, while there are plenty others worth mentioning, these should get you started. Make a list of these and compare them with your website—then implement.

1. Have a Clear and Direct Headline

The headline is what people see first, and the first make-or-break point. Since pictures alone rarely sufficient explain to people what the page is about or how it will help them get to where their ultimate destination (even if you don’t think they have one yet). Such headlines are easier for each and every one of your product pages, but you should not overlook the home page especially as that may be bringing in most of your traffic. I still see a lot of sites that forget to include the key value proposition. This message may even be rotated depending on your ongoing specials, events, or seasonal activities. Some of this may be contained in your TITLE tags.

After reviewing the top 10 converting sites of 2007 (according to Nielson Ratings), they all had a direct headline that revolved around current specials/seasons. Some even had a message that was not seasonal, such as AbeBooks “Search 13,5000 booksellers selling 110 million books.” There were exceptions like Amazon.com which is so recognized these days that they can get away with it; and Hollister, who also has an enormously recognized brand—besides, their site is all about fashion, which is told visually. ThePopcornFactory could have skewed data since they are doing so many things wrong, but truth is, I have clients with equally good conversion rate since most that are buying already know the brand.

2. Place High Value on Whitespace

In an ever noisier web, white-space helps guide the eye to key elements. How does cluttering up a page with dozens of elements help people? Even sites like Amazon are always trying to simplify the clutter. The easiest sites to navigate have clear blocks of white-space between sections, including product descriptions, images, specs, etc… In my experience, white-space may also be less important if your selling items that rely heavily on visual appeal, and therefore uses a few key images; however, the rest of the page must be clutter free. A good web designer will find this easier than a lot of business people that simply want to cram everything in there.

3. Deliver Your Value Proposition with Short Direct Messaging

While a great title gives people a good direction, your marketing message is the means to carry them there. This is a lot easier when the site you’re dealing with is dealing with only a couple key products or services. Ecommerce sites can be more challenging as this message may be broad on a home page, and more specific on each category/product page. Why should someone choose you over some other online store? It’s amazing how much a difference simply moving your value proposition into a 3 or 4 easy-to-read word phrase can make a difference, as compared to a long sentence that is small and hard to read, or not having one at all.

4. Have a Persuasive Message Directly Above the Call to Action

If your site does not persuade, then it will not sell or convert. This can mean even more if an additional message lies next to your “Add to Cart” buttons. Even Amazon (who does not do everything “right”) has next to each product “Get it by Wednesday, Mar 19 if you order in the next 15 hours and choose one-day shipping.” Here are a couple more I just thought up “Only 15 more in stock, hurry before we run out,” or “Guaranteed to make you look good for your next trip to the beach.” Ok, so maybe this isn’t the most persuasive writing here, but you get the idea.

5. Large Red Buttons Rule

I am not including this one since it is rather debatable. Debatable by many, and varies per site. Perhaps high contrast on a flashy site is better, or blended in neutral colors on conservative style sites. Best option is to split A/B test it on your own site. One size rarely fits all. What is important? Test, test, test ! Google’s free website optimizer may prove helpful.

6. Call to Action Copy Matters

Getting too cute here can be bad too, because people are familiar with certain phraseology like “Add to cart.” As the original article points out “Try it now” can be better because it’s less committal, and use a time-sensitive word such as “now.” For an ecommerce site, I have tried other things such as “add to bag” since it creates more of a premium shopping feeling. This is fairly easy to test.

7. Trust and Security are Still Incredibly Persuasive

Adding a few trust seals, SSL seals and such are one of the easiest things you can do, and in many cases cost you nothing. If possible keep that sense of safety close to the call to action. Conversion rates can go through the roof in some cases here. This doesn’t mean you should go out and pay for a monthly service either to get a logo on your website.

I highly recommend reading Jonathan’s full article for additional insights; it also has a full 3-step guide to Landing Page Optimization. Eventually, I will also write up a complete guide to landing page/conversion rate optimization. As you know, this blog is targeted towards smaller merchants running online stores. A decent shopping cart software company should be able to help you accommodate most if not all of these aspects since most of it is visual stuff.

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What is really cool is that for the phrase web marketing, it is in the top #125 spots  30 spots on Yahoo (top #75 for MSN), out of 1.9 billion results. I expect to surpass have surpassed Bruceclay.com very soon. For those that aren’t in the know, he is one of the biggest, and definitively original names in the commercializing of search engine optimization. Sure, his site is mainly about SEO, but he is still targeting that phrase on part of his site. He probably has tons of inbound links, while I only have a dozen tops.

Does that mean that I should charge $1,000 per hour like he does (or however much his rates are up to now)? Okay, so the words web marketing are in my domain name. Guess I only have one option then. Try to pick another phrase that he is targeting and see if I can surpass him there as well.

I know that while the phrase internet marketing gets more searches, it gets more competition too. I am not ready to take on the world in that regard, and I need this blog to continue narrowing its target focus.

The points to take away from this are:

• There is still a lot of ranking room for new players in the search engines
• Your domain name may want to include one or two or your primary keyword targets as long as it’s not too restrictive in the long run, and add to your memorability/brandability. Domains that are simply made up of lots of keywords are rarely successful; mainly because no one can remember them
• Focus on phrases you stand a chance for, and then move up to more competative stuff as you start to succeed
• Search engines vary widely in their results, and can do mysterious things sometimes even for perfect sites. Yahoo and MSN are definitely easier to get ranked in based on your on-site content, compared to the Google
• Focus on words that are going to get you the most visitors that are likely to stick around on your site

Dear Mr. Bruceclay. If you would like some consulting advice on web marketing or SEO, just give me a buzz. I am not cheap though.

If you have a story of how you are ranking above your competitors for especially difficult phrases, then leave a comment.

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Most search engine experts, as well as ecommerce experts say to stay away from Flash if keeping the visitor on your site is important.  In fact, most experts advise strongly against it (see sources below).  Exceptions for media and branding sites exist, but this is the minority out there. Avoid using Flash for Navigation elements especially.

Most of these techniques require Flash developers who know their stuff:

#1. Make an XHTML version of the site using Search Optimized Flash Architecture (SOFA). Here is a detailed white-paper on how its done (PDF) http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/articles/SOFA.pdf Send the XML content into the noscript tag.

#2. Another technique involves using SWFObject(). or FlashObject Basically a JavaScript is used to determine whether the visitors browser supports Flash enabled or not, and if it’s not, then it displays an alternate HTML page (in a DIV). Learn more about this technique here.

#3. Adobe (the makers of Flash) offer an SDK for creating an integrated, text only version of the Flash movie. “The SDK includes an application named ‘swf2html’. Swf2html extracts text and links from a Flash .SWF file, and returns the data to stdout or as an HTML document. Swf2html is provided as a compiled application, and as a static library for linked library implementation.”

Be sure the content in your HTML version of your Flash matches what is shown in the Flash, otherwise your site may disappear on the search engines.

Sources and further reading: SMarT Marketing, Bruceclay, Search Engine Watch

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Ecommerce SEO can be an entirely different beast as search engines often don’t take kindly to online stores; even including “search engine optimized shopping carts.” There are many unique challenges both for the merchant and for the search engines. This article covers the most basic stuff, up to the more advanced stuff to consider for ecommerce search engine optimization.

For example, how do you label products, all of which are nearly the same, so that they are optimized, but do not look spammy to the search engines?It does not cover all aspects of search engine optimization such as how to find a good domain name, how to find the ideal keyword density, etc…. Not planning ahead, or not understanding some of these steps can lead to disastrous results. If you launch a site without TITLE tags, or TITLE tags that are all the same, and try to fix them later, you can still get stuck with poor rankings for a long, long, long time. And like always, feel free to see our glossary as needed.

In no particular order, here they are…

Sections

• Content is much too overlooked in ecommerce
• Dealing with lots of items without accidentally spamming
• Search engine accessibility (they are blind too)
• Technology challenges specific to ecommerce
• Linking factors
• Really cool things you may not have thought of
• +1 - This is where you come in

Content is much too overlooked in ecommerce

• 1. Rich content outside of your product/category pages
  CONTENT IS CRITICAL !!! I mention “rich content” on at several points in this list, and overall, it is probably your best bet to good rankings, so please take the time to create the highest quality content you can muster up. You probably will not want to depend completely on your product catalog for good rankings around your most important phrases. It is best to create an additional resource for your primary keywords. This may include articles or a blog that you write, with the goal of creating unique, authoritative, and compelling content. The more interesting and compelling, the more likely people will link to it from their website, thereby getting you better rankings. I always say “write the type and quality of content for your own website, that you would want to find yourself, if you were searching on the search engines.” No software in the world will automate the writing of good content for your online store. Most merchants I see are not doing this vital step. Perhaps because it requires the most creativity, ongoing work, time, requires that merchants really know their stuff, and requires them to be able to express it in writing acceptable to the majority of their site visitors. Create an awesome blog that covers your industry. Write articles and publish them on your site. Attract both search engines as well as real visitors. Hire someone if you must, but get your content up as if your website’s life depends on it.
• 2. Never use generic manufacturer info for product descriptions
  This can be a real killer for many ecommerce sites. The problem is that your product page would then appear nearly identical to that of your competitors or manufacturer’s, and Google for example, hates duplicate content, so it will choose to only index one website. Chances of your site disappearing from the search engines, or at least those pages, are quite high. You may include manufacturer info, but you will need to add significant content to make it unique, including the TITLE tag if you can. How much different you ask? I would say, shoot for at least half. Some of this can be accomplished through things such as adding customer reviews to each product. This leads me on to the next point.
• 3. Content that can drive long-tail traffic
  This may include the manufacturer’s name, product specifications, how the product may be used, dimensions, product manuals and brochures (even in PDF format if that’s all you have), model numbers, SKU’s, UPC codes, serial numbers, etc… I discovered that simply listing another dimension to a piece of clothing really helped a few more people find that clothing in their size, via the search engines. I also have seen one of my sites which had really great rankings start to spike by an additional 10% in traffic per month for a few months after I got the roughly 75 product database indexed (previously it was not indexed).
  
• 4. Avoid products/categories devoid of content
  I estimate that at least half of new websites that I see get created get created with products and categories that have too little content—more than a sentence or two. And definitely do not overlook your category pages. Try to aim for a couple hundred words as a bare minimum, otherwise search engines may not index that page. If you have a page with little content, then search engines see little value in this. Humans visiting your site may also find it difficult to make an informed purchasing decision as well. A recent study by Forrester showed that the number one complaint from shoppers in making a purchase decision was lack of product information, so think about real people too when adding content.
  
• 5. Include the keyword multiple times in the product/category description
  Not only do you need content for your product/category pages, but you need to use the key phrase in the content as well. Simply having it appear only once as the product name really does not give it a lot of weight to make the search engines think that is what that product page is about. This can be challenging, but definitely workable, even if it is something creative like “buy product xyz today” and “product xyz specs.” Be sure the key phrase appears early on in the content (e.g. product description) as this follows the general rule about proximity, which I will briefly cover for newcomers in my next point.
• 6. Buying guides
  One strategy that is often overlooked is creating buying guides on your site, such as “how to buy Italian leather shoes,” “How to find my shoe size,” “Are Italian leather shoes right for me,” “Finding comfortable shoes that fit,” etc… This really comes in handy as not only does this create rich content, but it also gives your shoppers power. There are plenty of people online that are no where as near knowledgeable as you are about your own products, and countless people searching for this information online. One of my clients that sell diamonds has single-handedly accomplished some fairly unthinkable results by himself in probably some highly competitive phrases such as “diamond ring” and “diamond engagement ring.” He has done this through lots and lots of “how to” and “buying guides.” Ebay ranks in the top 25 on Google for “diamond” but what is important to note is that it is for their buying guide.
  

Dealing with lots of items without accidentally spamming

• 7. Relevant & focused phrases for product/category names
  If you sold “Italian shoes,” you would not want to have your page just called “shoes” and you would obviously not want to call it “cars.” You would want to call it “Italian shoes” since it is accurate and precise. Having phrases that are too broad (e.g. “shoes”) means that it will be more difficult to get high rankings for, as well as less likely to convert to sales. Category names can often be tougher in this aspect, but you can still apply the same principle in many cases. Using keyword tools such as Google’s keyword tool and SEO Book’s keyword tool can prove invaluable to finding the perfect phrases.
  Be prepared to spend a decent amount of time doing good research to understand what your product is and how to differentiate it from similar products; as well as finding phrases that are just the right size to take on. The last thing you want to do is launch your site, and thing change it all around cause you weren’t targeting the right key phrases. The thing that makes it more difficult for ecommerce is shear volume of phrases that you might be optimizing for; e.g. you have 10,000 products. Category names can become the focus here, but time should be spent on specific products especially for mass market items. Anyone want to guess how much time Amazon spends maintaining millions of pages ?
  
• 8. The proximity rule as it relates to content
  In review for some of who that already know this general principleThe earlier a key phrase appears, the better. This applies to everything from TITLE and META tags to file URL’s and product descriptions. Although proximity is a general rule to SEO, I mention this because people all too often forget that this applies to product descriptions, names, title tags, file name, and anything on the product page (categories too of course). Several shopping carts and/or websites that I have encountered do not seem to notice this factor very much.
• 9. Unique, well-structure TITLE tags *

  It is not uncommon to see ecommerce websites and dynamic sites that use a single TITLE tag throughout their site. I have seen numerous very well know businesses suffer from this. The TITLE tag should also follow the proximity rule for your product name first. Not having TITLE tags from day 1 of your online store launch could mean your storefront could get stuck with poor ranking for a long time. I will cover ecommerce structure in a latter point. The TITLE tag is essential to getting people from the search engine to click into your site. Let your products be detailed, and let your main topics, categories be more broad in their TITLE’s. As a refresher, TITLE tags serve three purposes

  1. To tell search engines what your page is mainly about. This is one of the most important elements to search engines.
     
  2. In the search engine results, you will notice that each result is made up of a link, and a short description. Coincidentally, this TITLE tag is what search engines use for the text of that link.
     
  3. When shoppers browse a website, the TITLE tag is the text they will see at the top of the browser (the blue bar). It also shows up for their bookmarks, and history, so make is easy on shoppers by creating a unique TITLE tag for each page. This can really get annoying on ecommerce sites that use all the same titles for all pages.
     
• 10. META tags
  For the most part, META tags are on their deathbed, however, smaller search engines such as MSN and Yahoo are still influenced by META tags to some degree. The META tags should only include words that can also be found within the content of the page itself to avoid penalties from the search engines. Again, remember the proximity rule.
• 11. Product and category identification structure which reduces spamming effect
  This is one of the most overlooked aspects mainly because it’s a very tough topic. Lets say you have a shoe site where all you sell are shoes. Let’s also suggest that you have several sub-categories. The question is, should every product and every category include the word “shoes?” the short answer is, probably not if you have lots of products. It may work if you have a few dozen products, but the problem is, if you had 1,000 shoes and 20 categories, including the word “shoes” on everything may look a little spammy to the search engines. My experience has shown that it can often be helpful to use the word in the category names, but not in the product names. Then in the product description and the TITLE and META tags. This might also mean that the TITLE tag (which contains the main theme keyword) has your category name included with it.
• 12. Duplicate content descriptions or names for products
  I have seen on occasion where a merchant will have 20 items which are basically the same name and thing, with the only differences being a color or size choice. In this case, you will still want to create unique titles for each. Search engines such as Google will only index one of those pages otherwise. I have seen large ecommerce sites have this “problem.” What I mean is, this is a grey area in that it may be best not to have 10 nearly identical pages in the first place, unless you do not mind that only one of them will get indexed. Using attributes on your products such as drop-down menus, radio buttons, etc.. to have several similar products instead of a unique product page for each, may be a better solution if it is feasible. Here is an example taken from Walmart.com.
• 13. One primary target phrase per page rule applies
  As you may already have heard elsewhere, trying to cram lots of keywords per page is not a good idea. Each product should have one focus. If you must come up with other variations, save it for your articles or blog, and point it back to your main product page. As for plurals, try to pick the phrase that you believe shoppers would use (shirts vs. shirt). This usually means singular form of the word (e.g. shirt). I also like to work in different spellings of the words in to my content.

Search engine accessibility (they are blind too)

• 14. Well designed homepage, with keyword emphasis
  A common mistake I see is ignoring their homepage, when the truth is, the homepage is your single most powerful page in the search engines’ eyes. This mistake usually includes people naming their home page “Home” or, “”My Business | Home” which is really bad. Pick your main key phrases, and use them instead”Affordable widgets | My Business name.” Whether you use your business in your title tags is a long debate. Your homepage should have a lot of rich content with your main key phrases.
• 15. Making your categories/products accessible from the homepage
  Fewer steps to get to products/categories is better. The deeper the links, the more slow the search engines seem to take them in, and the more diluted it gets. On the other hand, you don’t want 100+ links all on your homepage. If you have 25,000 items for sale, then you might need three levels or more, but good planning is needed. Having 15 – 25 categories per level is ideal for shoppers. More than that that can be overwhelming for shoppers, and less than that can be mean that you have too many sub-categories if you have lots of products. The number of items per category is less important from a shoppers perspective, as long as they are easily navigable and viewable. For example, you could fit 100 items on a page if that meant small compact images, or easy layouts. Using a “sort by price, popularity, alphabetical, etc…” feature or “filter products by price, brand, color, etc…” can also help shoppers find what they want. I cover usability in other articles, but it goes hand-in-hand with SEO.
• 16. Other tools for search engine accessibility
  If possible, and especially for larger sites, include a sitemap for human visitors as well as one for search engines (each engine is different, but XML is sort of the universal format at the moment). Get an RSS feed going for your most popular categories. If you have the ability, perhaps you can even make one that lets shoppers track a search results page like eBay does. Internet savvy people that visit your site will find the RSS helpful as well. I also have seen cases where a merchant is submitting their products into a shopping feed engine which in turn helped bring up their rankings quick in Yahoo. Another simple way to get #1 rankings in Google is to submit your products to Google Products (which is free). Google often shows these results between the paid listings and the organic listings. Talk about free, prime placement advertising.

Technology challenges specific to ecommerce

• 17. Search engine friendly URL’s
  Long dynamic links like http://www.mysite.com/product.asp?productsku=123&color=black can be really difficult, if not impossible for most search engines to index. Some big ecommerce sites still suffer from this as it’s not a quick fix in most cases. Instead, product-123-color-black.html is better. Apache users can use mod-rewrite to do this (advanced skills required). This is one of the best things you can do, but one of the more difficult ones because most fair sized ecommerce sites are managed by a database program, which typically uses the format of the “?” and “&” characters.
• 18. Optimized file names and locations
  Also one of the more important points, the URL would best be named after your product name. Using the previous step as an example, http://www.mysite.com/swanky-italian-shoes.html would be much better than just using the product id, or SKU. Try not to get excessively long with the names as this can be a negative point in more than one aspect (users think it looks weird or even scary). Proximity factors in here as well. You would want the keyword to appear immediately after the domain name, and not in a deep sub-folder like thishttp://mysite.com/folder1/folder2/product.html. Using hyphens or no spaces at all tend to work best (as opposed to underscores).
• 19. Semantically correct content
  I hope you are at least using H1 tags for product names and category names. Add emphasis to your keywords as they appear in the content, bulleted lists, etc… You know, stuff you would expect to find in a website coded by a professional web designer, or at least a helf-decent one. Quite often, out-of-the-box shopping carts do not do this as all because they were built by programmers and not skilled web designers. This also includes things like ALT and NAME tags on your images—no, do not use the same ALT tag on all your products. This also means that your webpage is best built using CSS, preferably from a design company that codes it all by hand, since most programs like DreamWeaver and FrontPage (Expression-Web) add a lot of unnecessary code.
• 20. Dynamic HTML pages
  Some debate that many search engines really like pages that end in extensions such as .html and .htm as opposed to .php, .asp, and other languages. I have done limited tests where a few pages on a site were not getting indexed apparently because they had unusual file extension names. I have also encountered other sites built with a common extension such as .asp, but they did not get good indexing until that switched to .html—I just like to say “results may vary” on this topic. Ideally, your html pages are dynamically generated as well; what I mean is that most higher-end shopping carts and ecommerce software generates pages dynamically from a database, but some will let you publish static pages. The risk here is that a page gets outdated, or is not published properly. Some shopping cart software will generate dynamic pages that end in .html giving you the best of both worlds.
• 21. Eliminate session ID’s common to dynamic applications
  Session ID’s within your product/category pages can be detrimental. These are long numbers that appear in your address bar when you are visiting a website, common to many websites today. Their purpose is so that each shopper that comes to your website gets a unique ID do that software can track them separate from every other user on the site. The problem is that each time a search engine comes to your site, it gets a new ID, and the search engine thinks they are completely new pages each time since the link looks new. A search engine optimized shopping cart will not display these ID’s for your category and product pages (at least to the search engines). On occasion, cookies can do funny things to the engines as well.
  
• 22. Avoid other inaccessible on-site elements common to ecommerce
  Including JavaScript category/product menus unless there are alternative versions for search engines—I have seen this on sites past such as Lowes and Amazon. The problem is partly due to massive online stores with countless products. For example, CSS menus can help here (CSS and frames are something your web designer should know about I would hope), instead of image buttons and javascript menus; problem is, these are still up and coming in many plug-and-play shopping cart platforms. Avoid frames—yes I still see several sites in frames still. I also still see lots of ecommerce sites that depend primarily on Flash and images without lots of content, probably because they are depending more on site cool-ness factors and branding than they are concerned about search engines. Other problems can exist, but exceed the scope of this article such as temporary redirects, duplicate content, etc…

Linking factors

• 23. Internal linking
  All too often, this factor is overlooked in ecommerce, but easily accomplished. Create links from product pages to other pages, and vice versa. When you write your blog for example, link to product pages in your article content (not just links in the footer and such). One way this can be accomplished easily to some degree is to use your shopping cart’s cross-selling (a.k.a. related items, recommend products) feature . Avoid having cases where one page (e.g. page A) has two virtually identical links on it that point to one other page (e.g. page B) within your website. Of course, it is expected that you are using the link text (a.k.a. anchor text) in your links. E.g. “check out these Italian leather shoes” is much better than “Check out this product” it is best of all to make the links within the description of the product. The all-too-common “more info” link on products should be renamed/removed, or use the nofollow tag.
• 24. When building inbound links, link to deep category/product pages
  Be sure that when you are able to control the inbound links to your site, that you take the time to link to specific categories and product pages, using appropriate anchor text of course. All too often, I see ecommerce sites limiting themselves by only linking everything to the homepage, or, to a few internal pages. Also be sure that any page you link to, such as a dynamic product page, that they are going to be permanent for the most part; or, if you must move a page, use a 301 redirect as needed. When linking back to the home page, use the full domain name (and never index.html); also use the keywords or business name in the link, including breadcrumbs “Shoes’ R Us Home”
• 25. Breadcrumb navigation
  Always a plus point for search engines as well as human visitors. This gives a slight benefit to improving internal linking. Many carts include this, many other carts don’t.
• 26. Invite users and site visitors to link to specific product pages
  On each of your categories and product pages, you can create a ready made link for visitors to use. This does not increase rankings directly, but does make it easier for people to link to your site when they find a page they like. Maybe offering an incentive though can help foster the likelihood of your customers/visitors to link to you. Again, anchor text is what counts.

Really cool things you may not have thought of

• 27. Tags
  There are not many existing ecommerce platforms that have ecommerce tagging abilities built in (see Amazon.com for examples of product tagging in action), but you can still often do it the gold ol’ fashion way (by hand in the product description); or as an ecommerce plug-in. These tags would be other ways of labeling your products. Use in moderation and carefully. You don’t want to dilute your main keyword too much as each additional keyword on the page potentially dilutes the power of the main phrase of the page. Anywhere between 5 and 20 phrases are probably acceptable.
• 28. Review and publish on-site search data
  If your online store has a search tool where your shoppers can search for items, you should review this on a regular basis. This can prove invaluable for you as it differs from search engine traffic, and paid advertising traffic in that it can keep track anything people might be looking for. On more than one occasion, I have found phrases in there that I did not expect at all, and have since used that data to find new products to carry for my online store. The other thing you can do with your data is make a short list of “the 25 most popular searches” on your site that are otherwise not to be found on your site, and link them to their respective categories/products. This can assist shoppers to find what is popular, especially for products that can be named or identified in more than one way. For example, maybe they are searching for “Italiano leather shoes” The word “Italiano” is the Italian spelling of “Italian.” You may consider using this in conjunction with the tagging mentioned previously. If you some more examples I have seen this occur in a variety of ways including certain fashion trends that resurface often will go by different names; what one person may call “rustic” another may call “country;” sometimes a common spelling was multiple variations.
  
• 29. Using nofollow links for all non-important pages
  (very debatable) Using the “nofollow” tag on your internal links to tell search engines to ignore certain pages is a strategy used by some online retailers. You use the “nofollow” tag to tell the search engines to not count the link in its rankings. You would use this on useless pages like your legal policies, shopping cart page, etc… Doing this can help funnel, or focus the links that are important. For those that understand what PageRank is, this can help funnel your internal pagerank.
• 30. Other commonly overlooked items
  I won’t cover everything about SEO, but I will say that a lot of common easy tweaks include redirecting non-www to www version of your site to reduce potential issues with canonicalization issues; making sure your dynamic pages are not being spidered accidentally (use the nofollow to stop duplicate content here). The words that make up your domain name is very powerful to search engines, but as a warning, you can get a domain that is based on your #1 keyword, but you lose the potential to create a unique and memorable brand, as well as expand your SEO to other phrases. I am aware of very few successful sites based purely on a keyword phrase such as http://www.italian-leather-shoes.com. Sometimes fitting in your single most important phrase is not a bad idea, such as in http://widgetmania.com. But if you start selling anything else, it can limit you as you might have guessed.

+1 - This is where you come in

I will take the best suggestion from the comments below and make it this final point, complete with credit and link back of your choice.

Now, I pose a question to you if you want to comment about something - how do the search engines feel about multi-homed products, or products with filters as navigation. A classic example of this is Newegg.com. You can see how Google ranks a given product numerous times, but what are the specific pros and cons to this approach? This type of navigation can include standard link menus, or drop-down menus. Part of the challenge is dealing with TITLE tags, and the biggest issueduplicate content. Please respond in the comments below.

I can tell you these strategies work in the real world*. I look forward to your comments for improvement and suggestion from great SEO’s out there, and from users with proven results.

For those wishing to delve headfirst into SEO, see Aaron Wall’s site (see Blogroll links to the right)— he has some of the best quality free SEO information on the web, and also writes the SEO Book which is great reading for those serious about learning all aspects surrounding SEO.

* Items with the icon are for Veracart shopping cart software to indicate to them that the shopping cart does this step practically automatically for you (for the most part).

** How do I know? I have many clients who rank #1 and do very well in terms of making a good living primarily off of search engine traffic. Additionally, I rank #1 for all of my main keywords on Google, and have done so for over a year. These phrases are rated “very high advertiser competition” according to Google Adwords, as well as very heavily searched

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[Advanced topic]

As you may have heard, Google decided to drop the displaying of “supplemental index” as they improve their search engine. This was a useful tool to many of us, however, there are workarounds, and key points to remembered so that you can live without it.

Most importantly, you should note that the SERPS have not changed, only the fact that the phrase “supplemental index” is not gone. In short, simply look at your bottom pages, and begin to decipher why they might be there. This is the only guide on the web that covers ALL reported aspects of what causes the supplemental index:

1. Insufficient content
   1. Try to have a few paragraphs (50+ words)
2. Duplicate, irrelevant, or long TITLE tags
   1. Each page should have a unique tag that labels that page. Be sure content in title appears on page.
3. Duplicate, irrelevant, or long META tags
   1. Same as previous. This also includes duplicates of keywords within the single tag.
4. Orphaned pages
   1. Create some internal or get some inbound links
5. Long URL’s
   1. Shorten them, otherwise they look spammy
6. Pages that are TOO bloated with keywords
   1. lower your keyword density

Unverified

1. Duplicate content
   1. Need I say more? Don’t have the same content on multiple pages on your site, or copy entire pages from other sites.
2. Links from bad neighborhoods.

Thee funny thing is, none of these individual pieces are really new for many of us, just good practices that you should be following in the first place.

To get out of the supplemental index, you have a few options to try (besides fixing the aforementioned problems):

1. Submit a Google sitemap
2. Get inbound links to those pages, or links from your homepage. “Get more quality backlinks. This is a key way that our algorithms will view your pages as more valuable to retain in our main index.” Adam – Google rep (from Google webmaster forums).
3. As a last resort, move the pages, using 301 redirects, to new page names—not recommended in mass.
4. You can request that Google remove the pages completely, but re-inclusion for those pages can take 6 months.

”Beware: Once removed from our index, the pages will STAY removed for 6 months and won’t be re-included during that time, so remove carefully
(and only use this tool if absolutely necessary). “ – Adam

I am surprised to see how many sites are stuck in limbo because of common mistakes like these. Supplemental index is history.

I always like to shamelessly promote myself: Veracart, our hosted ecommerce solution, avoids all of these problems by default, assuming you put in sufficient, unique, non-spammy products descriptions. SEO rule #1: Just be natural and inform people well, and stop trying to trick the search engines.

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One of the fastest and easiest ways to find out about a company you plan on doing business with is to check with the local Better Business Bureau (BBB). Too many people end up going with shady companies, losing lots of money and time as a result. We are surprised by how many people do not check a company before doing business with them.

Here are some tips on how you can use the BBB to your best advantage:

Listed-yes/no ?

Obviously if the company has no listing at all, then they are very small and do not have enough feedback for you to know whether they are reputable; or perhaps they are not a real company at all.

Complaints Ratio

While a big company such as Wal-Mart or Honda may have thousands of complaints that may be miniscule compared to the total number of customers they have. Smaller companies will have fewer complaints relatively. Personally, I would not choose a company with worse than a 1% complaint rate. Here, we have a total complaint rate of about 1/10th of 1%, all of which so far have been resolved as satisfactory. Not every transaction is perfect, nor can a company make every client happy. In fact, you may soon discover that some customers will go as far as falsifying information.

Complaints Resolved

Has the company taken the time to resolve complaints? Do they give reasonable answers? How did the customer respond back? This can often be the most thorough way to rate a company.

Overall BBB Rating

There are basically two statuses that the BBB gives to a business: satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Basically if a company attempts to resolve most issues in a professional and legal way, they will have a satisfactory rating. Unsatisfactory ratings indicates lack of response by a company to complaints, unsatisfactory responses, and unusual volume of complaints, recent legal troubles, or scummy sales practices.

Quoting the BBB:

“A business identified in our report as satisfactory has, based on Bureau files, been in business for at least one year, and has voluntarily provided the Bureau with all information requested about the business and its product or service. If any complaints have been received about the business, their number has not been considered by the BBB to be extreme, given the nature of the company’s business and the volume of business transacted. Complaints are also generally typical of what might be expected for this type of business.
A business stated to be satisfactory has not been the subject of any recent law enforcement actions concerning its dealings with the public. If the business has been contacted by the BBB about its advertising or selling claims, it has modified or substantiated its practices to the Bureau’s satisfaction. In addition, the BBB has a clear understanding of the company’s business, and the business is not in an industry which has raised significant marketplace concerns”

“The mention of complaints in a BBB report is not necessarily negative. The finest businesses get complaints. Look for statements about the causes of the complaints and if the complaints are being resolved. When considering complaint information, please take into account the company’s size and volume of transactions, and understand that the nature of complaints and a firm’s responses to them are often more important than the number of complaints.”

While the BBB is the most professional resource for checking out a company, simply using the web may also give you a picture. Again, many of the same rules apply, expect for the fact that in many cases a company cannot defend themselves directly in such cases. I have found it useful in looking for common trends in the types of complaints a company receives, such as “ ‘xyz company’ has a long history locking customers funds in their bank/merchant accounts. “

So the customer is not always right as you will find, especially for those handful that stretch the truth, are mislead, or outright falsify information—in fact, since a company can receive thousands of complaints, all of which can be under public scrutiny, it seems to me that a company would really go out of there way to make a customer happy—the opposite however is not true—there is no database of shoppers/customers, and therefore no incentive for them to submit quality feedback on a company. The exception here is sites like eBay, but you get the idea.

We are proud to support the BBB !

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• The official guide from the FTC
• In depth details, more of a step-by-step guide, on how to actually do it
• Microsoft (Hotmail) for example has their own guidelines here, some of which is pretty deep stuff for a lay-person; but as you may have guessed every major ISP (AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, Gmail, etc..) will have their own set of guidelines. I tend to follow the big few, and hope to solve most deliverability problems with the smaller ones as well

The fact is, no matter how well you setup and maintain your email marketing, it will not all get through. For example, a little over a year ago, Lyris, one of the most expensive (not necessarily the best) email marketing services around, reported that overall, Gmail only accepted 79.1% of commercial email, with another 16% being delivered to the recipients spam box. See the full report here

The funny thing is, some companies out there claim a deliverability rate of 99%+. In an upcoming article, I will discuss the “best in class” email marketing companies out there, based on some detailed research, along with some inside information about these companies, and how not to get ripped off in the process. I will also go into more depth about various do-it-yourself options as well.

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Screenshot of hits (since I can’t show you actual order info)

It was quite simple actually, yet I never knew it could be so dramatic. Their call-to-action was irresistibly urgent. You see, Warner Brothers took them over as of this month. The point is, they announced on their site a couple of months ago that they would no longer be carrying the Harry Potter products because of the acquisition. Like black magic, the orders began to snowball. It makes me wonder how sites like Woot do with their urgent calls.

Whether its a 1-day-sale, or seasonal product, urgency pretty much falls into the fact that something is limited, and therefore scarce:

LIMITED TIME (e.g. Today only)
LIMITED AVAILABILITY : (e.g. Limited to first 100 buyers)
LIMETED OFFER: (e.g. get a free item thrown in)

Combination of the above: “This weekend only, we will be selling 500 edition limited prints.” Maybe throw in a discount too if that helps.

One qualm I have with things like “Limited to first 100 buyers” is all the people that buy thereafter, pay full price, and then want a refund because they didn’t make the deal in time; I believe there are better ways.

My point is, can you find existing ways to drive your shoppers to action? Okay, be genuine, and not be cheesy like “Expire offers today at midnight,” and that message is there every day; and/or other similar tactics. Urgency alone won’t help something people don’t want in the first place. You will just end up with returns.

I would like to hear your story out there about a urgency related, call-to-action (Call-to-action: Your invitation to cause people to want to act upon some specific task) that has resulted in incredible results.

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