Most e-commerce website owners are under the impression that SEO is too difficult to apply to an e-commerce site. While it is not always easy to come up with content ideas for an online store, implementing a few simple steps can go a long way in gaining better search engine rankings, more links and more traffic.
Here are 7 easy suggestions that will help you in optimizing your e-commerce website:
- Use keywords/key phrases: If possible, try to create a page for each individual product in your store so that you can take advantage of longtail keyword phrases. Also make sure that the keywords you select are simple but specific because they’re the terms you expect visitors to type into the search engine in order to locate your site.
- Ensure quality inbound links: Search engines give credit to internal links because they indicate the level of usefulness for the visitors. Therefore, be sure to link your relevant content together by using the proper anchor text and linking to quality and related content.
- Add unique product/service descriptions: Unique product/service descriptions are a great way to increase the traffic to your site. Re-word product descriptions to ensure that they are as unique as possible. Additionally, you could also add as much detail about the product or service as possible.
- Include quality content to your online store: Including quality content that is of a useful nature to your visitor can help in optimizing your site. For example, if your site sells cosmetics, you could include content on health and beauty tips, how to extend the shelf life of cosmetics, etc.
- Create profiles on social media sites: Social Media Optimization is now an integral part of SEO. Be sure to create profiles on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other social sites and update them regularly.
- Include product reviews on your website: This is an integral part of optimization since it not only helps generate content for your site but also helps in attracting potential buyers. Use Social Q&A sites such as MyLot.com, Yahoo Answers and Askville.com to request reviews. Alternatively, you could also post queries within your website asking for user experience and feedback.
- Cross-reference related items: Cross-referencing related items between individual product pages helps in adding relevant content to each page and also creates healthy internal linking, which in turn will increase your search engine rankings.
