Hi everyone, I would like to have some input from the more experienced guys than I am. I am trying to SEO my wife's online store. Well, problem is there isn't too much I can do about the content, since she gets all descriptions of the items from her supplier and with more than 2500 products they need to be updated on a regular basis it is gonna be hard to edit each product description. Also the store won't be a typical niche store. It's just something she loves or she is interested in working with. Another drawback is the content/descriptions won't be real unique since there are a few other shops selling from that supplier too, using the same product descriptions. I am very aware of a number 1 ranking for this store is pretty much impossible unless we would spend maybe thousands of dollars on a SEO company, dollars we just don't have. So what can I do to get traffic and also action instead of bounces? I'm thinking about a combination of high competition keywords with lots of searches and some long tail (3-4 words) keywords with hardly any competition but also with less searches to get some traffic in the store at all. All Main categories and product names are h2 or h3 tags. Any input, advice or help is greatly appreciated. Thank you Verdecove
The first step should be to examine your code. Certain code detracts from the way a search engine will rank a site for relevancy. Cascading Style Sheets (CCS), for instance, don’t mean anything to search engines. Where possible, move the CSS code off individual pages of your Web site and into a separate folder. Then, use a single line of HTML to reference the CSS code. According to Nebergall, at least 80-percent of your main page should be text, with the balance being code. Your site should also be W3C-compliant to ensure that people can view your site correctly—and don't use code that works only in some browsers. The second step for new Web shop owners is to work on their site’s metadata —everything that fits in between the <head> and </head> tags on the page—such as the Title, Description, Subject and Classification. Baxter’s Web shop uses “^9Weaim10^ Knives†as the title. Unless people search for that exact phrase, this title is not relevant. “The title is forty-percent of the relevancy,†explained Nebergall. “Be sure to use the primary search terms [keywords] you want associated with your site, like hunting knives or pocket knives and reference in phrases like discount or bargain prices.†Here, Baxter could use secondary phrases like outdoors and hunting, whichever are more popular searches. Google indexes 150 characters in the Title, but the keywords must be placed in the first 70 characters. The Description is also important. This is the text under the Title on the search engine results page (SERP). Here you should use your most compelling sales copy and include both primary and secondary keywords. The Description can be up to 250 characters, but since Google truncates everything after the 168th character, get the most important details in before that cut-off point. Other important tags include Classification and Subject. Classification can take up to 100 characters, and is used to determine relevancy along with the Subject tag, which can take up to 150 characters. Don't worry about tidy writing for eitehr tag; just make sure to include all your keywords (primary, secondary and tertiary). Google doesn’t use the Keywords for relevancy (although other search engines do). In Google, Nebergall said, Keywords just adds to your keyword density — that is the percentage of the number of times a particular keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words on a page. Don’t use more than 250 characters in your keyword field as anything after that isn’t indexed. Google also likes fresh content, but Nebergall says you don’t need to constantly overhaul your articles. Instead, add to existing content and weight it for your key search terms. Don’t overweight the keywords as Google will see that as spam. Nebergall recommends keywords to be 1.75 to 2.5 percent of all text on your site.
Thank You Candise, for your reply. Following all your advices will give me some good thinking to do choosing the right keywords and working on my meta tags. I didn't know about the subject and classification tags.
FYI Google doesn't credit the meta keywords at all. See: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/
Thank you for your reply. I read about Google doesn't credit the meta tags anymore but other search engines still do. So it won't hurt to keep primary and some of secondary keywords in the meta tags I would think. My question is how many keywords in the meta tags is enough and how many is too much?
It doesn't matter. What really matters is that do not pile up keywords in meta description, as well as in page content.
It would be always better- Hire any SEO Expert or contact any SEO Agency for this work. They will do it better. And if you want to learn once you will study the all steps then implement those in your website. You will learn I am sure. Keywords or content or link you will understand all the things.
Thank you for your advice. I do agree with you but with a small budget as what we have right now (wife lost her good paid job a few weeks ago and I have no idea for how long I still will have my job since we have worked for the same company) the hireing of an SEO expert is just impossible. So we will just keep learning by doing and we will learn out of mistakes we might make and do better the next time.
Follow these simple steps and get your site boost up.. Rich unique content 3-7 keyword density include keywords in title, descrption, and keywords navigational strcture anf off page stuff...Go for it and get what you looking for thnks
Buy the book called 'search engine optimziation' by Kristopher B Jones (CEO of pepperjam network). I found it has good lots of info every page. That is every turn of page brings up a new concept from start of the left page to end of the right page (1 technique per fold). Then you may want to check out the link I have in my sig. Very affordable way of spreading your site links on the internet.
Thank you for all your replies and advices. I will try to follow them the best I can and will just have to wait and see what comes out and what I need to improve or change. Just a note in general: I have read a lot on this forum and can tell this is one if not THAT most helpful forum on the net! Thank you!
If your website is a big one .. then you must concentrate on the quality of the site and leave the SEO to an Expert.
Submit all your products to Google base - it helps in indexing will bring you some traffic before other SEO methods start working. IMHO.
I never even thought about that. How can that be done? Can you please explain the single steps it takes to get the products listed in Google base? I really appreciate your time. Thank you
One of the biggest mistakes new ecommerce owners make is buying a new domain name. It's much harder to rank a new domain than an older, "aged" domain. Since the shop is still new, you may want to look at buying a domain name that has been dropped or not registered that is a couple years old, checkout freshdrop.net to find a domain name. For instance, were starting a new medical supply shop and bought the 6 year old domain emedicalnet.com. It has our medical keyword in it and is an older domain name making it much easier to seo. The one thing to watch out for is buying a domain that is banned by google. Though rare, it will make seo useless just google "how to check for banned domain" for more information. If you need any help seoing your store or want any other advice feel free to drop me a line.
Also thanks to you for your advice and your offer to help. I might come back on it. What concerns buying an "aged" domain so we didn't do that. Instead we registered a domain which includes almost all of our main keywords which reflect the theme of the shop. I hope by doing that I could achieve a little benefit / advantage when it comes to SEO the shop.
do alot of link building and make sure not to stuff the keywords in the content and description and submit articles and respond to alot of do follow blogs hope that helps
o yeah and xpirtdesign.com can give you some basic instructions on basic seo and alot of details and help so go there or click on the link below
verdecove, I know where you are coming from. For keywords in your title you want to keep it short and sweet. Buy Product Name - Price (if lower than most people) | category | The UPC Code (a lot of people search these) Since I am a programmer I easily modified my shopping cart to keep my titles and descriptions optimized as I desired. I do know out of the box it did not give me what I wanted. Without my programming skills I would never have been able to fix this. As for the descriptions that come from the manufacturer. This is where you can make the biggest impact. Since most people use what is sent from the manufacturer(myself included) you will find the duplication of content tremendous. If someone would work daily on revamping and changing these descriptions I think you will find that this will pay off for you. You will be one of the few with unique content. 2,600 products is not that bad. (try 140,000) Work daily on it for a couple of hours per day and I think you will find the task soon done. Make sure you have several links to other products on each product page. This helps with inner linking and to get your inner pages indexed. The best of luck to you! PS: An affiliate program doesn't hurt anything and you can get people to sell your products for you: http://www.qualityunit.com/postaffiliatepro/