Showing posts with label search engine optimisation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search engine optimisation. Show all posts

Friday, 16 November 2012

How to improve your business with inbound marketing

When running an ecommerce store, getting customers to become aware of your store is the hardest part. Many people, when they set up an ecommerce store, think they can just set it up and leave it there for people to visit without them having to do anything. Sadly, this is far from the truth.

We at eSellution tell our customers that having an ecommerce store is like having a bricks and mortar store that is miles away from the high street, down a small darkened street that no one ever goes down. If no one knows your store is there, no one is going to visit. One of the ways to increase public knowledge of your store is through inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing allows you to not only increase traffic, but also turn these initial visitors into strong sales leads. Depending on the size of your business there are a number of different things you can do to help improve traffic to your store.

Search Engine Optimisation

The bread and butter of all websites and something which is a must if you are to achieve the levels of traffic that you will need in order to be successful. However, depending on your budget, there are varying levels of SEO that you can undertake. If you don't have much to spend on SEO, the basics you can look to cover are to make sure your products and your pages are all optimised to provide the best search engine results. This includes:

  • Ensure all of your titles have keywords included that a user will search for. Generally you want your keywords to be within the first few words of the product title as these are what a user will search for. The closer your product title matches a users search engine query, the higher up the search results your product is going to be ranked and the more traffic your website will achieve.
  • Place meta tags on your products and your categories. Just like optimising your product titles, you need to place all of the meta keywords and phrases that are to do with your business and the individual products you have on sale. This should be very straightforward to do no matter what ecommerce software you are using. When selecting keywords, you want to choose words and phrases that has had the most search engine queries in the last month. You can find this out either by using a keyword tool such as the free one provided by Google or simply by typing a keyword into the search engine search bar and looking at the related search phrases that are popular with users.
  • Place keywords related to your business through your page content and in your page titles. When Google crawls across various websites, they pick up keywords in order to relate those keywords to a particular search engine query. For example, if you sell womens clothes, you should have keywords such as womens clothing, womens dresses, etc. That way, when a user enters one of these keywords or phrases into a search engine, your page will be shown as a result.
Even after you have made all of these changes to your site you need to be patient. In order for your pages to be ranked by a search engine such as Google, you need to have those pages crawled by search engine spiders in order to pick up all of the keywords and phrases to do with your site and then have them indexed within the search engine. It usually takes between 4 and 6 weeks before you begin seeing results in search engine queries. 

Blog

Following on from carrying out SEO for your business, a blog is a great tool for not only increasing your search engine ranking through backlinks, but also drawing in an audience and then converting them into customers. When creating content for your blog, you should look to write about anything to do your ecommerce store. Users will then visit your article in order to read about that particular subject. You can then place links on the page giving these readers information about how they can access some of the products you have on sale. While not all of these users will visit your online store, you will get a few who will take a look at the products you have on sale.

In terms of backlinks within your articles, you should place hyperlinks on keywords in your article to pages on your site that relate to that particular page. For example, if you wrong womens dress in your article, you may create a backlink from those keywords to the page on your store that has the womens dresses you have on sale. 

Social Media

As we have stated in the past, social media is the best tool to allow you to regularly engage with your customers and other followers. To ensure you help them create an active interest in your business which results in them visiting your store and possibly making a purchase you need to:

  • Post content on a regular basis including links to your ecommerce store
  • Answer any questions your followers may have
  • Post images of various products you have for sale
  • Tell your followers about any promotions you are running
  • Make each of the users you engage with feel valued, building up that initial relationship that will hopefully develop into them becoming a customer.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is a marketing tool that some businesses use to help drive traffic to your store and increase your overall conversion rate. It works by having adverts about your business appearing on search engine queries to do with specific keywords that are related to your business. In order to have your advert appear, you must bid on these keywords, the higher you bid, the higher up the search results page your advert will appear. If a user is interested in your advert, they can then click on it and be taken directly to your site. Based on the price you have bid, you will then pay Google or whatever provider you are using for the cost of the click. You can also set a limit for how much you want to spend each day. For example, you may only want to spend a total of £10 a day with a cost per click on 50p. Once your ad has achieved 20 clicks for the day, the advert will be disabled from the search engine until the next day The benefit of this is that you know the people who are adverts are appearing to will have an interest in the products you have on offer as they have searched for keywords related to it. 


Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html

eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk
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Monday, 8 October 2012

What 4G means for your ecommerce store

With cities up and down the country rolling out new 4G capabilities within the next few months, what will this  new high-speed data service mean for your online store?

4G will allow mobile devices to have download capabilities up to 100 megabytes per second, that's more than double the speed on current 3G mobile devices. This means that in terms of your ecommerce store, mobile commerce has never been more important. This significantly increased download speed will mean that your online store will load on smartphones much quicker, resulting in customers being able to carry out their shopping experience faster than ever. Not only will this make customers happier, it will also result in you being able to take more orders over a shorter period of time.

However, looking at 4G as simply a way of allowing your current ecommerce store to load quicker on mobile devices is limiting it's true capabilities. Rather than looking at what it can do for your current mobile store, you should be looking at how it can help you have a more advanced mobile store. Currently, a number of mobile stores are limited on the amount of data they can have. The bigger your store in terms of data, the longer it is going to take to load on a mobile device. 

This drastically increased speed that 4G provides means that a mobile store on a 4G network can hold much more data and still load quicker than your current 3G store. For this reason, you should be looking at what you can do to in terms of making your store more appealing to your customers visiting through mobile devices. This could consist of having more detailed designs in terms of layout and buttons, having more images to entice customers to purchase your items, insert videos or having a complete overhaul, creating a new, more efficient mobile store from scratch. 

Another benefit comes in not only the ability for a customer to view your store's pages quicker, but also find your store quicker through other methods. If a customer is using a mobile app to find the cheapest price for a product they are looking for, they will either use the app itself or the search engine capability on their smartphone to trawl through a number of different ecommerce stores looking for the best deal. On the current 3G data service, due to some sites loading slower than others, a customer may grow tired of the process after searching through four or five different online stores. What this means is that if your store is low down in terms of search engine ranking, the likelihood is that they won't come across your site. Increased speed through 4G capabilities means customers will be able to go through more online stores at a quicker rate, greatly increasing the chances of a customer actually coming across your ecommerce store during their search.

However, even with the 4G data service, if your store is on say page 10 of Google, no matter how quickly a page loads, a customer just isn't going to spend the time searching through all the preceding pages until they come across yours. For this reason, you need to look at your store's SEO as well as your mobile store capabilities. For help on improving your online store's search engine ranking, check out: 'New businesses guide to SEO success' 

If you have yet to set up your own mobile store or are looking to upgrade your current model, you can sign up with eSellution and get a free mobile store in time for the 4G boom. 

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Wednesday, 3 October 2012

Selecting the right keywords to make your business a success

Making your website search engine friendly is key in helping lift your ecommerce store up the search engine rankings, allowing you to increase your brand image, drive more traffic to your site and increase the number of sales you can achieve.

If you have only recently started running an online store or are unsure as to how SEO words, selecting the right meta tags and keywords for your pages and products can often be a difficult task. Inserting the wrong word or even the wrong letter can make the difference between having a keyword that gets thousands of monthly searches and a word that gets very few.

See how the keywords perform locally and globally
In order to see which keywords are more popular than others in search engines, both locally and globally, you can use a number of different keyword tools. If you are a small business and do not have much money to put towards your store's SEO, you can use Google's free keyword tool. This tool allows you to enter various keywords or phrases and then will show you how many people have searched for that phrase on Google in the last month. The tool also gives you a list of similar key phrases which you may want to use. This allows you to look through a list of key phrases that relate to what it is your business provides and select the most popular keywords for each. 

This tool shouldn't just be used for the keywords for each of your webpages, you should look to use it for every single one of the products your store has no sale. Having popular meta information for each of your products allows people to come across your products through search engine queries, rather than coming across a page and then stumbling across your product on that page. Furthermore, if you have no yet decided on a domain name for your business, you can also use a keyword tool to help choose the right one. This allows you to include the most popular keywords within your domain name, enabling you to have your site start off as high up the rankings as possible, while also allowing you to increase the number of people who will come across your site. However, when selecting keywords for your domain address, you must always bear in mind that it should make sense and be something a user would search for. There's no point having a bunch of popular keywords as your domain name when it all likelihood a user wouldn't enter all of these keywords into a search engine. 

After you have entered the keywords for all the different aspects of your online store, the worst thing you can  do is just leave it at that. Like all aspects of public interest, most things come and go out of fashion, meaning one month your key phrase may be highly searchable, but the next month it may have very few searches. Atleast once a month you should look at all your keywords to see how they are performing in both local and global searches. If you find that some keywords are going down and there are other you didn't use that are on the rise, you may want to think about switching out your falling keywords for the ones that are on the up.

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Monday, 1 October 2012

Google's SEO crackdown

Many people send hours each day creating unique, entertaining content to place on their ecommerce store, only for someone to come along, decide that content looks good and simply copy and paste it on to their site in an attempt to increase their own search engine ranking without having to do any work. 

Google are now attempting to cut out duplicating content altogether by penalising websites that have previously been accused of copyright infringement. This means that if a website has had a number of copyright accusations against them, their website will appear further down the search rankings, drastically affecting the traffic levels the site will generate. 

According to statistics released by Google, they receive over 4 million site removal requests each month, who now receive and remove more copyright removal requests than they did in the whole of 2009.

Copyright infringement doesn't just consist of copying text from a website, it could be a picture, graphic or any other form of content that can be placed on a website. 

How to stop your site being penalised


If you come across content that you find interesting and you would like to possibly incorporate within your own online store's blog there are a number of things you can do to avoid being accused of copyright infringement.

Contact the company that has published the information and ask if you could produce an article on the same topic on your site. Although you won't be able to copy and paste the content on to your own site, if they do agree to letting you use it, they may let you use certain segments of the text in order to boost your own content. If you use a quote or content from anther site, it will be a good idea to reference that site that you got the quote or content from. This simply means placing a link to the article as one of your sources at the end of the article.

If you use an image from another site, you will usually find that it has some sort of copyright label on it. If they have this label on it, it will usually mean you can't use the image but there is no harm in contacting the site and asking if you can use it. If you do use an image from another site, you should not only state on image caption what the image's source is, but you should also host the image yourself. 

If you are unsure about what you can and can't use on a website, rather than doing what you think's best and taking a gamble, simply contact them and ask. That way you will be specifically told what you can and can't use.






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Thursday, 20 September 2012

How to get your local business to the top of Google

All businesses, whether they are a large corporate brand or a small online store, spend a substantial amount each year on trying to get their business to the top of the rankings through search engine optimisation.  

No matter what type of business you run, due to the substantial amount of ecommerce stores that are all selling the same products, it is going to be difficult to get your business at the top of a search engine using any keywords.

However, if you are an online business with a local address, you can look to increase the sales your business can achieve locally simply through your geographical location. When someone is looking for a particular product or service within their local area, they will look for services in their area using a search engine. For example, if someone is looking for car repairs and live in Preston, they will type "Car repair in Preston." The search engine will then crawl through the webpages and bring back all the sites that fit this search query.

As the user has searched for services within a specific geographical location, the search engine will also bring up a list of businesses related to the search through the maps feature on the first few search results. When each business ranks within this feature is dependant on how close the a business's address is to the centre of that particular location. 

So if you are small business struggling to establish an online presence, you can look to take advantage of this feature by moving your business as close to the centre of your town or city as you can. That way when someone searches for the service you provide within your area, it will ensure that your business appears on the first page of the search engine results. This will result in not only an increase in online traffic, but also will probably result more walk in sales for your store. 

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Monday, 3 September 2012

Don't forget about the website

In the last few weeks we have looked at all of the various aspects that make up your online store such as social and mobile commerce. However, while these are all important parts in making your store a success, you shouldn't forget about the importance in ensuring your ecommerce website is always to the highest possible standard.

A recent survey carried out by Econsultancy found that out of the 100 senior decision makers of global retail brands questioned, 59% intend to invest the greatest amount on improving their websites in the next 12 months.

While small businesses cannot afford to spend the same budget on keeping their website up to date as some major brands, there are a number of things you can look to do to help ensure that your website never falls behind your rivals.

Website Redesign


Although the store front or template style of your online store could look really good at first, with the constant improvements in design, you may soon find that your competitors have moved ahead of you in creating an appealing site. If you haven't made any changes to your online store for a long time, you should look at possibly retouching your site to give it a new feel or if you wish you could look to give it a complete overhaul.

As well as creating a new design for your store, you may also look to create a new logo. Creating a new logo not only allows you to give your store a new lease of life, but it can also help you create a new and improved brand identity that will bring a whole new customer base. However, what you need to bear in mind is that your logo plays a large part in the current brand identity of your business. Changing the logo may alienate some customers, resulting in them feeling less comfortable purchasing from your store. 

Keyword Analysis


Now I know that to some people, search engine optimisation can be a rather dull task, but the benefits it brings to your ecommerce store means that it is something you should look at. As keywords play a primary role in your website's search engine ranking, leaving the same keywords over a prolonged period of time can result in your website falling sharply down the rankings.

While leaving the look of your store front can result in it becoming outdated, the same applies to your keywords. Over a period of time, keywords can go up or down in popularity with people's interests constantly changing. When placing keywords on your website, you need to regularly check how popular specific keywords are to ensure you don't have words linked to your site that generates very little traffic. 

Product Layout


If after a period of time you find that you have good traffic but your sales are slowly declining, you may look to try and freshen up your site by changing the layout of your products. This could mean introducing new categories to break up some of your products or simply spacing them out with less products per page. A clearer layout makes it easier for customers to navigate their way through your site and find a product they would like to purchase.

Changing the Domain


When you originally set up your online store, you may have chosen a domain address purely because some of the others you wanted weren't available. Every now and then you should check if any of the alternative domains you wanted have become available. This will allow you to transfer your store across to a domain that you would rather have as it's name may be better or it could be much more effective from an SEO standpoint. However, when changing your domain, you do not want to get rid of your old address, but simply use it as a redirect to your new address. This means that when a customer visits your old website they will still be able to follow you to your new store in order to make a purchase. 

Even if you decide that you want to keep your original domain, you can still look to purchase other domains as landing pages for your store. The more direct links you have to your online store, the more traffic you are going to generate.

However, while the website is of crucial importance, out of those asked in the survey, 74% stated that they were intending to increase their online presence through social media, with 35% focussing to look more closely at Pinterest. If you have recently set up a business or are looking to expand your social commerce, read: The Basic Guide to Social Commerce, for information and assistance on what social media sites you should be looking at to improve your business. 



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Friday, 31 August 2012

Move your images up the rankings

If you run an online store, you are going to have numerous images of the different products that your business  sells. While we all know the importance of search engine optimisation in ensuring the highest possible ranking for your website, you shouldn't forget the need to carry out this optimisation on your images. 

When a customer is looking to find a particular item they want to buy, they sometimes use the image section on a search engine to find a product that they are interested in. Ensuring that each of your images has the correct level of search engine optimisation will mean that when a user carries out a search related to your product, your images will be as high up the ranking as they possibly can. This will drastically increase the chances of you gaining extra traffic to your website, resulting in a number of extra sales.

Alt Tags

For those who don't know, alt tags are descriptive text for images which can be placed into an image using HTML. This descriptive text is what the search engine uses to determine it's ranking within certain keyword searches. When selecting your description text you must ensure that it clearly describes that the image portrays while still including some keywords.

If you wish to insert alt tags into your images, insert the following code into your webpage, entering the required information into each field: 

<img src="Image file" alt="Image description text"/>

Anchor Text

Like the alt tags, this allows you to link your image to the text when describing the content of the image. When inserting the anchor text you should look to use words that are keywords related to not only what the image depicts, but also the content for the webpage. 

File name

The name of the image is very important when it comes to a search engine identifying it's keywords. A search engine is going to have difficulty placing an image with a keyword if the file name is for example,  "img00232." When you select that image to place within your ecommerce store, you need to rename the file so what it is called something that relates to what the image depicts.

SEO the whole page

It's no good just going SEO for that images that you wish to place in your store. Whatever images you decide to place on your website, you need to make sure that the entire page is optimised for search engines. This means making sure that your page contains the correct keywords, meta tags and has backlinks placed on other sites that point back to your page.



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Tuesday, 28 August 2012

Time saving SEO for your online business

When running an online store, you can't afford to spend all of your time focussing on where your site is placed in the search engine rankings and how you can move your site up the rankings as there are other things which may take priority, such as enticing customers to your store and making sales.

However, while you can't spend all day keeping track of your search engine ranking, there are a number of things that you can look to do each day that will help you keep on top of it all. These are simple things that you can do first thing on a morning that will take you no time at all.

Google Analytics

Whether you are focussing purely on SEO or not, checking your website's analytics is a must for any online business. Not only does it give you an indication of how many people are visiting your ecommerce store, it allows you to see which specific pages they are visiting, how many pages each visitor goes on and where they originated from. All of this information is key in developing your marketing campaign and ensuring your website is as efficient and enticing as it possibly could be. In terms of SEO, this allows you to see which keywords are drawing people to your website, which backlinks are working and which are your most popular landing pages. If you find that certain keywords or backlinks aren't drawing any traffic to your website, you may need to look to alter or remove them altogether in order to replace them with ones which will result in more traffic. 

Check for duplicated content

If you produce a blog or various articles for your online business, having none duplicated content is extremely important when determining your search engine ranking. However, it isn't just you duplicating other people's content that could damage your ranking, but people duplicating your content on other websites. You should check on a regular basis whether there are any websites out there that are duplicating your content. There are a number of easy ways to do this. The easiest way to check this is to copy a chunk of text from an article and place it into a search engine. If the content brings up a search result that isn't your own website, it tells you that someone has duplicated your content. Another way to check on duplicated content is through websites such as "Copyscape." Copy in the address of your blog post into the address bar and then click "Go." The website will search the web to find any websites that have the same information as that included in your article. If you do find that there is a website that has duplicated your content, you should contact that website and demand that your content be removed from their site. If they refuse to remove the content you could request the the site be banned from search engine results. You could also bring legal proceedings against the site by giving them a cease and desist order which legally requires them to remove the content from their site or face further ramifications. 

Social bookmarking and forums

The more direct links you have to your website, the higher your online store is going to place in search engine rankings. When you create content such as articles, you should visit various social bookmarking sites and place links to your pages for users to access. Forums are also another great way for you to gain some easy links to your website. What this essentially involves is visiting forums related to what your business does and interacting with the community. This could be posting on a particular thread or creating your own thread to do with your business. If you comment on a thread, make sure you have a link to your website in your profile signature. This gives people who view your comment a way to access your business in order to find out more information about what it is your business does and what you offer. 

While sites like Facebook and Twitter are considered social engagement sites rather than bookmarking, you should also be placing links to various parts of your business. If you publish a blog, you should be placing article links for people to read. If you run an eBay store or other ecommerce business, you should post content advertising your products and offers on a regular basis along with links for users to access.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster tools allows you to check your website to see if there any crawling errors that have been flagged up on your site. Not only that you can see how fast your website is, any HTML improvements you can make on your site and how your click through rate is fairing on particular keywords. If you are constantly adding new content and new pages to your site you should look to check this everyday to see if any of these links have been flagged for errors. 



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Friday, 24 August 2012

How to maximise your blog followers

No matter what online business you run, the majority of people will have their own online blog to help improve their SEO standing and create a platform to regularly engage with and inform their audience. 

As there are so many people producing a steady stream of content on a daily basis, how do you help your blog stand out from the rest and tell people that they must come to your blog because your content is a must read for anyone?

Originality

This is the most obvious aspect of any online blog. The content needs to not only be entertaining to your readers, it also needs to be as original as it possibly can. What you don't want to do is simply look through other peoples blogs, find an article you like and then copy it into your own blog. This is extremely bad for three reasons: 

  • Duplicated content is frowned upon by Google and will result in your search engine ranking going down
  • Readers won't want to visit your blog to read an article that they have just read on another website.
  • It will damage the whole credibility of your business as customers will see this plagiarism, instantly making you seem untrustworthy.

When producing content for your online store, you are going to find that whatever subject you choose to write about, it has pretty much been covered by someone else previously. However, blogs are a great platform for personal opinion. So taking this into account, look to put a different spin on the subject. Look at it from an angle that others previously haven't considered, including any personal opinions you have on the subject. This will give you the best chance to make your content as original as you possibly can. 

Place your content everywhere

If your content is interesting and appealing to an audience, you are going to get people who will specifically come to your blog to read your latest posts. However, you shouldn't just post a blog article then sit back and wait for them to come to your site. Like any good salesman, you should be out there advertising your content, encouraging them to come to your site and take a look at what you have on offer. 

This doesn't just mean sharing your content with fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter, you should be playing your content on social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. The more external links you can create to your blog, the greater chance you have of people visiting it. You can also look to promote your content as a rebuttal on other blogs. For example, like I said earlier, you should look to create content that looks at certain aspects of your profession but at a different angle. You can then visit another blog that has a post on the same particular topic and link your blog post in the comments for readers to gain another point of view. 

Encourage interaction

When you place content out into the public domain, you can often be worried about any criticism or negative opinions it might generate. You need to get past this and understand that interaction on your blog is not only a great way to gain readers, but it is also a superb way to gain some exposure for your blog and your business as a whole. If someone disagrees with a point that you have made in your blog then reply to the comment with response to their opinion. This then encourages others to get involved and creates a platform for discussion, improving your relationship with these users. This is how you will build up some of your regular blog followers. 

When replying to a comment, you should always remember that you are seen as the authoritative, professional source. Even if someone's comment infuriates you, keep your cool and don't launch an attack on the user. This will just alienate a number of users from your blog and damage your public image. Reply in a manner that is professional and courteous, keeping your cool and explaining your side of the discussion in a clear, concise way.  

Be selective with keywords

 A large part of SEO comes in having the right keywords in your text and writing a blog is no different. The more relevant your keywords, the more likely your article is going to be found in search engines. When writing an article about a particular topic, you should always consider what keywords you wish to place in the text. This will then allow you to write the article in a way that includes these keywords, while still making sense to your audience.

If you are unsure which keywords to use in your blog, you can use a keyword program such as Google's Keyword Tool to find out which are the most searched for words both locally and globally. You can then incorporate these words into your articles to ensure that you have the best chance of people finding your article through a search engine and then visiting your ecommerce business as a result.

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Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Create the perfect SEO and user friendly website for your business

When building an online store from scratch, the layout of your store is everything, not just to appeal to visiting customers, but to also make your website SEO friendly, bringing more customers to your website through search engine rankings. Generally, when people look to set up an online store, they are eager to set it up as quickly as possibly in order to begin selling straight away. While getting your website up and running as soon as possible is important, it should be done in conjunction with ensuring your site is well designed rather than in sacrifice of.

As most people are now aware of, the most important part of on page SEO for your website comes in placing keywords that relate to your business throughout your site while still making sure all of the content is readable. If you are unfamiliar with keywords and how they can significantly help your website move up the rankings, check out my previous article on basic SEO for everything you need to know. (New Businesses Guide to SEO Success)

However, while SEO on your website is of vital importance, you need to make sure that the aesthetics of your website are as appealing to visiting customers as your keywords are to Google. It's no good having great SEO which moves your site high up search engine rankings, bringing a number of new customers to your site, only for those new customers to then be put off by the layout. When a customer first visits your site, they spend just under three seconds quickly scanning the whole page from top to bottom. This means that they spend around 180 milliseconds on one area of your site before moving on to the next. This emphasises the importance of making a good impression right from the get go or else they may leave your site and never return.  

Generally, people tend to read a screen the same way they would read text, moving from left to right. Therefore, you may want to have your business's logo placed in the top left corner of the page, meaning when customers visit your site, the logo is the first thing they see. This instantly creates a brand identity for your business as customers will become familiar with your logo. 

Although you want to have as much information as you possibly can on your pages to keep your customers informed, you simply do not want to flood your page with text. You may think "if I have a lot of text, it means I can put a load of keywords in there for SEO making it a good idea, right?" If you look at all major brand websites, their layout tends to be clean and uncluttered, meaning they have only the most necessary information on a page. As a person spends 2.6 seconds scanning a website before focussing on a particular area of interest, having huge chunks of text through the page is going to be rather off putting as they don't want to have to read through reams of text pick out the information that is of interest to them. 

As the only saying goes  "A picture paints a thousand words" and this is never truer when creating a website for your online store. If you run an ecommerce business that sells products such as clothing, electronics and other goods, images of your products and promotional animations are going to be much more appealing than text, as they instantly tell customers information that may have taken you a couple of paragraphs to relay through text. 

What most websites tend to do is have one focal image at the top of the page, underneath the navigation bar. This works as an appealing image to draw the viewers eye, encouraging them to work their way down through the page.

This idea of making your website as easy to navigate as possible should also be taken into account when displaying images of your products for customers to purchase. While it would be easier to just lay out your items all on one page and have customers choose from them, in terms of navigation, it can make it rather difficult to find the item they want. Breakdown your products into different categories in terms of what you sell with a separate page for each category and links to those various categories placed on either the top of side of each page.

First IMPRESSIONS of your website
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Monday, 20 August 2012

Creating the perfect social media strategy for your business

From a purely SEO perspective, social media is a fantastic tool for any online business to help create backlinks and  get more traffic to your business, moving your site higher and higher up the search engine rankings.

A recent study found that the more posts you have, the more shares you are going to get, which isn't rocket science as the more options in terms of content you give an audience, the more chance the audience will find some of it interesting. However, while placing as much content you can, across as many places as possible is going to help your website grow, to get the best possibly results you need to analyse what you post and when you post it to help generate as many likes, shares and reads as possible.  

Statistically, the more prominent types of posts placed across social media are picture and text based as they are much easier to create than say, a video. As I highlighted in a post two weeks ago (Boost your brand identity with Instrgram), it's not about how many pictures you can post across social media, but more what these images contain. One imaginative and entertaining image is going to get a ton more shares and clicks than a whole host of generic photos. Now when it comes to having text based posts, the balance between quantity and quality is much more tricky depending on what your posts are and what type of business you run. If the posts you regularly place on social media are regarding offers, sales and products on your online store then the more posts you place on social media, the better, as this is all content that people are definitely going to be interested in. If the text based content you post is more SEO orientated, consisting of articles and blog posts, you need to be more selective. While you can post as many blog posts and articles are you like, as there will be different people who are interested in reading different articles, users may become increasingly annoyed with a constant barrage of article posts appearing on their feeds. If the aim of your social media content is to purely create as many shares and possible, helping to increase customer's awareness of your business, then you need to focus primarily on pictures and videos. Videos are a much trickier form of social media than text or pictures, but if done correctly it can be the most rewarding. When you create a video for your social media site, it can be something to do with your business i.e. a promotional advert, or it could be nothing to do with your business whatsoever. The more original the idea, the more chance you have of that video becoming viral, meaning literally thousands of people will see it and become aware of your brand identity. While I have broken down each of the various types of social media posts, the best social media accounts are those which use all of these in equal proportion to produce unique and appealing content.  

Right, now we've looked at what to post and how often to post it, the next stage is to figure out when to post it. You could have a fantastic article, picture or video, but if you post it at the wrong time, then not many people are going to see it and it is not going to achieve its potential. What I mean by this is, there's no point posting content in the middle of the night when pretty much no one is going to see it. To achieve the most number of likes and shares as you possibly can, you should look to post your content any time between 6pm and 8pm in the evening. This is the time when people have come home from a busy day at work and are catching up on all the activity on their social media account. Although the evening is the most profitable time to post, you will find that you have more success during this period from Monday to Wednesday as opposed to Thursday and Friday. 

If you are willing to put in the hard work to make the social commerce section of your business as successful as possible, you should look to post content during the weekend. The weekend is the most popular time for social media activity, with pretty much everyone checking their social media accounts numerous times over this period. Take advantage of this and get your content out there for people to see. If you run an online or eBay store that sells goods, then perking someone's interest with a social media post could be the best way to encourage them to visit your site and make a weekend purchase.



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Thursday, 9 August 2012

New businesses guide to SEO success

In an extremely competitive marketplace, how easily people can locate your online business is going to play a big part in how many customers you get. For any website, search engine optimisation plays a huge role in improving your ranking in a search engine query. The higher you are placed up the a search engine ranking, the more people will visit your online store.

Search engine optimisation comes in two forms; on page and off page SEO. As the names suggest, on page SEO is the different techniques you can employ within your website's content to increase your search engine ranking and off page SEO is the ability to create link building campaigns to your website. When optimising your website for SEO purposes, you should look to establish on page SEO within your site before looking to create a link building campaign.

However, before you carry out any form of SEO on your website, you need to ensure that your website is of the highest quality. This means ensuring that the layout is correct and the spelling and grammar is as it should be. What you don't want to do is build up a great SEO campaign that results in your online business flying up the search engine rankings only to then have a website that is below par.

On-Page SEO


When carrying out on page SEO, what you need to do is place different keywords on your site that users regularly use within a search engine query. When someone searches for something on a search engine, the search engine spiders then crawl the website looking for websites that have those keywords. Depending on what your online business offers, you need to select keywords that relate to what your business does and what products you sell. However, how do you know which keywords and regularly searched for by users? Well this is where keyword tools come in to play. If you go on the Google Keyword Tool page, you can type in a keyword that relates to your business. The tool then displays all of the keywords that relate to this phrase and tells you how many local and global searches have been carried using these words. When selecting your keywords from this list, you want to select the keywords that have the highest search numbers.

Now that you have your list of keywords, where do you put them on your site? To truly maximise SEO for your website, you need to create a blog. This will be placed on your site and will include a number of different of posts and articles that consist of various subjects related to your online business. When creating these article posts you need to include these keywords that relate to your business. However, Google's algorithm penalises sites which just randomly place a load of keywords throughout the text, resulting in the website appearing lower down the rankings rather than higher. When placing keywords within a blog post, you should look to only have three or four keywords. When inserting these keywords, you need to make sure that the text still makes sense. What you don't want to do is insert keywords into a sentence that don't belong. Even with the keywords inserted, the blog post still needs to make sense and be readable to the audience. 

It isn't just blog posts where you need to insert these keywords, you should look to have these keywords on the various web pages of your site. These keywords come in two forms, keywords within the page's text itself and meta tags. Keywords in the text are similar to those in the blog posts. What you need to do is include the most searched for keywords within your web page text that relate to what your online business offers. 

Meta tags are keywords that provide information about the website. This information is hidden from web page viewers and is solely used as information for search engines. The same as the other keywords on your website, each page should have its own keywords that relate to what the page contains, while having high searchability by users. 

As I touched on earlier, when carrying out on-page SEO, you need to ensure that you do not carry out any techniques that are going to result in your site being penalised, these are known as black hat SEO techniques. 

Other black hat techniques you should avoid include: 
  • Duplicating content
  • Placing hidden links or keywords on your page
  • Duplicating title tags
  • Repeating keywords
If you are unsure what these various black hat techniques are, you can check out our previous post on the subject for more information: Black Hat SEO - At Your Own Risk!

Off-Page SEO


Now that you have created a website with a good layout, good content and on-page SEO techniques throughout, you next need to boost your website through off-page SEO techniques. This essentially involves creating a link building campaign that places a number of links across the Internet that directs traffic straight to your website. The more traffic you receive on your website, the higher your website will be placed within the rankings. The easiest way to do this is to place links to your website on various social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. This form of social commerce is the best way to ensure that you have constant links placed on these sites directly to your site is to constantly share the various blog posts you create. What this does is ensures that you are constantly placing new links on to the sites with fresh content, rather than just placing the same link over and over again.

However, it is not just the number of direct links to your website you have, but also the quality of those links. Having links to more established websites is going to play a greater role in improving your SEO ranking. When deciding which websites to place these links on, you should also look to include websites that have a similar interest to what your online business provides. 

When creating the links to share your content on other websites, you need to make sure that the URLs you use are SEO friendly. If you are new to creating websites, the URL is the address for your page that will appear in the address bar at the top of the Internet browser. When giving your web page a name you need to make sure that it is something relevant to your business with keywords inserted. You should check the URL of each page to make sure they are correct, as some content management systems simply insert random letters and hyphens as the URL. If a webpage has this random URL, it instantly looks like spam to both the user and the search engine, penalising the site as a result. Keep your URLs as short as you possibly can, only including the keywords that are to do with that page.

Another great way to increase the number of direct links your site has is to regularly interact with other users. Visit forums, comment on other peoples posts, respond to social media queries, all of these are great ways to spread links to your site. For example, if you comment on a popular blog post that someone has written, you can set up your own account so that your name on the comment then links to your website. This means that when someone reads your comment, they may be interested to find out more about you and will click on the link to go to your website. This is an easy way to increase your link building and can result in you having a number of new direct links in minutes.  

To take your ecommerce or eBay store as high up the search engine rankings as you possibly can, you need to make sure that you use all of these different techniques. However, it is not a case of simply doing them once and then you never have to do them again. What you need to do is constantly check which keywords and platforms are the most popular. You then need to constantly update your site's keywords and where you place the links to ensure you are always reaching as many people as you possibly can.

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