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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The best way to boost your blog reads

Creating a blog for your online business is a great way to make your website SEO friendly, improving the likelihood that people will see it at the top of search engine rankings. However, with the number of people who produce their own blogs, getting readers to consistently visit your blog can be difficult. Rather than waiting for them to come to you, there are ways for you to go to them, show them your work and hopefully bring them back to your site. Social bookmarking websites are a great way to help give your blog that extra boost in terms of reads.

StumbleUpon

One of the best social networking sites around in terms of boosting the number of readers your articles can achieve. However, these reads aren't necessarily from people who are interested in reading your content. How StumbleUpon works is that you sign up and select a certain number of categories that you are interested in. Once you click the "Stumble" button, you are then sent bounced to random webpages that are to do with one of your specific interests. If you have your blog content within StumbleUpon, it means that your article will be one of these pages that users see. 

When you use Stumbleupon, you need to make sure that you don't use it as a one way street to only promote your own content. If you continually submit pages from the same URL address, StumbleUpon will tag you as being a spammer and will block you from submitting future pages from that URL. To avoid this you need to make sure you use the bookmarking site to its full potential. Visit different websites that are of interest to you and like their pages. This will not only tailor your Stumble feed to show articles that are of interest to you, but will also allow you to keep posting your own blog articles without being seen as a spammer.

Digg

Digg is a social bookmarking site that has stood the rest of time, still ranking in the top five of all bookmarking sites despite being one of the first created. While it is harder to get reads on Digg as opposed to the previously mentioned StumbleUpon, if you manage to get your blog posts on to the front page of Digg you are guaranteed to have people reading your article in droves. Posts that tend to do better than others on Digg are news articles and niche articles. What I mean by niche is articles that stand out from all others, creating humour and touching on a topic that previously hasn't been touched on much by other users. 

Delicious

The first ever social bookmarking site to go live on the Internet and it's still going strong today. Delicious allows you to simply add links to your blog article and then add as many tags to that post as you like. The more tags you place on a post, the more chance that users are going to come across it in their search. LIke Digg, your blog post will only really receive significant amounts of traffic to your blog if it manages to make the front page. There isn't really anyway to artificially enhance this, you simply need to wait for people to like it and move it up the ranking.

Reddit

Unlike the previous two social bookmarking sites, Digg is a site that you need to work hard at in order to make your posts a success. You cannot simply add your post to the site and then be done with it until you next wish to add a page. In order to achieve the best levels of success, you need to regularly engage in conversation with other users and help them by providing content and other information that could be of use to them.

Inbound

A bookmarking site aimed at people interested in Internet marketing posts. However, the site does allow you to post articles that are to do with related topics such as ecommerce, advertising and other forms of marketing. The website is very much in it's infancy but is full of potential. If you are someone who regularly creates posts on these subjects, it will allow you to create gain a number of dedicated number of followers who will become interested in any future posts you make. 

Other notable mentions

While these sites aren't considered social bookmarking sites, it would be crazy not to use them to promote your blog posts and articles. Twitter, Google+ and Facebook are still some of the best ways to promote your blog, articles or anything to do with your business through social interaction and social commerce. With over a billion combined users, the potential audience you can reach is simply staggering, meaning that one single post could be shared between your friends and other people who are interested in your site, allowing you to gain a substantial number of reads in a short space of time. Not only that, it allows you to promote your online store and brand image easily, enticing users to visit your site.

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Starting an Online Business? - Guide 8 – Making The Website Interactive

A big mistake that businesses make is to simply put their current company literature onto a website and expect this to be sufficient to have a maximum impact online. A business does not want a web visitor to have the same experience that they could have from offline literature. The business website must utilise the potential of the internet and form a website that is engaging and communicates to the web visitor on many levels. A successful online business utilises the creativity and communication techniques that can be sought online to give the customer an interactive experience on the website.

Having an interactive ecommerce solution is now an obligation for businesses to sell online. Many businesses fail to add certain elements to their website which engage with the customer, here are the top elements that need to be included in an ecommerce software solution:

Social Bookmarking: The recent Google algorithm update has meant the need for an ecommerce solution to have a social presence is now a necessity. There is now huge traffic and potential customers on social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The ecommerce software must have the ability to link into these sites and interact with their customers. Having sharing buttons on the ecommerce solution so that customers can spread the word on your behalf to their friends and colleagues is a priceless marketing tool and is so simple to incorporate.

The businesses social presence is now benefitting the businesses search results more than ever with the algorithm update. This means that increasing the social brand will benefit the traffic and potential sales. By adding these ‘share’ buttons and ‘like’ buttons will increase your social presence and now that the search engines are using a websites social status as an element when ranking the website they are essential tools that need to be incorporated.

Email Newsletter: Collecting web visitors’ information and statistics is fundamental to the success of an online business, knowing their web habits and behaviours will give the business an advantage over competition. By adding a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ option, the business is then able to gain an email address of the web visitor and interact via email. When the email list starts to grow, it can be become one of your most valuable marketing tools as information can sent directly to the web visitors’ inbox. By engaging with the customer, with their consent, the ecommerce solution is more likely to make a sale, as the customer has expressed an interest in the website already.

Incorporating these elements into a business website will gain the website an exposure to your customers and interact with them to create sales. By utilising the social market will give the business an exposure to a market that is growing all the time and will be the future of how a customer finds your product or service.