SEO Strategy for e-commerce stores
We are going to assume that your e-commerce store sells computer parts. A quick search in Google for “computer parts” returns 17 million results. I did a quick check in WordTracker to see how many searches “computer parts” receives in a day - about 1,600 (thats excluding keywords like “cheap computer parts” and “best computer parts”). I did a check for “computer hardware” - this receives 70 million results and gets about 600 searches a day. A search for “computer accessories” returns 26 million results, and it gets around 158 searches a day. Now, obviously these are pretty competitive keywords. We will only be targeting these keywords on the front page. Why? Because our goal is have our inner pages (possibly product pages?) rank for lower competition keywords. So, I would go ahead and use the following meta information for my home page:

Title: Computer Parts, Computer Hardware, and Computer Accessories - YourSite.com
Meta Keywords: “computer parts, computer hardware, computer accessories, best computer parts, cheap computer parts, computer parts and accessories, computer parts online, computer parts store, computer parts distributor, comupter parts, comptuer parts, coputer parts, computre parts” (Hint: I found these using WordTracker).
Meta Description: “YourSite.com is one of the leading computer parts distributors in the Midwestern United States. We offer some of the best computer parts and computer hardware available. Get great deals on computer accessories too!”

Write some content for your front page using some of your keywords. Try and do it without sounding corny - and don’t spam your keywords. Put a couple of them in bold tags, and put “computer parts” in a heading (H1) tag.

Feel good? Great, now I want you to completely forget about those keywords, as you wont come back to them for a long while. Those keywords are a long term goal, but the real traffic and revenue is going to come from your narrowed, long-tail keywords. With an e-commerce store, many of these keywords will be your product name.

Achieving more traffic and sales from long-tail keywords
Alright, I’m going to assume that most of e-commerce store owners have some kind of product administration system that allows them to easily add products to their store. For this demonstration, we are going to assume that you have a new hard drive to put into your store. Alright, so head on over to your keyword tool and find the estimated searches per day for “hard drive”. According to WordTracker, “hard drive” is searched about 600 times a day on average. A competition check in Google tells me that 90 million sites are competing for that keyword. Obviously this is an extremely competitive keyword. Let’s try to narrow it down a bit. Let’s try adding the brand name in there (assume its a 500gb Western Digital) - “western digital hard drive”. This keyword is searched 60 times a day and returns 398,000 results in Google. This keyword is much less competitive than “hard drives” and would be much easier to obtain first or second page rankings in Google. Now, I always suggest attempting to target 2 keywords per page, even on products. So, I’m going to do a search for “500gb hard drive”, which is searched 25 times a day and returns 645,000 results in Google. Note: I also saw the keyword “Western Digital 500gb Hard Drive” in Wordtracker, I’ll get to that soon. Now I’m going to target my product page for those two keywords.

How do I target my product page for specific keywords?
Every e-commerce system should give you the ability to define the title tag, meta tags, and URL rewrite. If it doesn’t, please email me and I can give you a list of suggestions for an e-commerce system. Here is what I would use for those properties:

Title: “Western Digital Hard Drive - 500gb Hard Drive”
Meta Keywords: “western digital hard drive, 500gb hard drive, western digital 500gb hard drive, western digital hard drives, western digital hard drive ide, western digital 500g hard drives” (notice I used that keyword I mentioned earlier)
Meta Description: “A western digital hard drive is the top choice for any custom built PC. Read reviews of the western digital 500gb hard drive.”
URL Rewrite: western-digital-hard-drive (.php, .html, .asp, whatever extension you like. Don’t let “SEO Experts” try and tell you that certain extensions rank better than others - because that’s not true)

One of my readers asked me: Why don’t you just target the keyword “Western Digital 500gb Hard Drive” and be done with it?
Answer: Using the keywords “Western Digital Hard Drive” and “500gb Hard Drive” promise more traffic. However - using a title tag such as the one I defined above will likely get you ranked for “Western Digital Hard Drive”, “500gb Hard Drive”, and “Western Digital 500gb Hard Drive”. Google is smart and often ranks sites for keyword strings like “Western Digital 500gb Hard Drive” even if it doesn’t appear in the title or content. It can pick up on substrings of the keyword, like “Western Digital” and “500gb Hard Drive”. It will automatically assume that the page is also relevant to “Western Digital 500gb Hard Drive”.

When you are writing a description for your product page, a good rule is to use around 150 words. I can’t stress enough the importance of content when optimizing a product page. I often find that online stores will use 1 liner descriptions - and this is not sufficient. *Google loves content, the more content the better. Do not spam your descriptions with keywords - A good rule is to use about 1 keyword per 50 words.

What are importance tags and how should I use them within my store?
Importance tags are given to words or phrases relevant to your point, or in our case, to your page. Here is a list of importance tags most relevant to an e-commerce store and how I would use them.

• H2 Heading tag - Detailed description of product name (”Western Digital 500gb Hard Drive”)
• H1 Heading tag - Put this around your logo. Give your logo an alt text for your main keyword (”computer parts”). Link your logo to your homepage. Don’t ask why, just do it.
• Bold or Strong - Encapsulate around your keywords throughout your content. A good rule is to only put important tags on about half of your keywords from within your content.
• Anchor Tag (Link) - As I stated in my Basic SEO Guide, it is beneficial to link to your own page from within the page (put the anchor around your keywords).

Alright, your product page should be about finished (aside from your images, etc). Lets begin working on your category pages. Hopefully, within your administration, your category pages allow you to set most of the same properties as the products. At this moment, we will make the Hard Drives category. I would set it up with the following properties:

Title: “Hard Drives, External Hard Drives, Laptop Hard Drives”
Meta Description: “YourSite.com is one of the leading distributors of external hard drives, pc hard drives, and laptop hard drives. We stock our supply full of computer hard drives from various manufacturers.”
Meta Keywords: “hard drives, external hard drives, laptop hard drives, pc hard drives, computer hard drives, best external hard drives, portable hard drive, sata hard drive, harddrive, external harddrive, laptop harddrive, notebook harddrives, hardrive, external hardrive, laptop hardrive”

Again, I used Wordtracker to find all of these keywords. The misspellings get about 30 searches a day each, which is amazing because they have low competition. Set your importance tags the same way we did our product page. If you have questions about writing content for your product or category descriptions, please just leave me a comment and I can step you through it.

I’m going to step away from category and product pages now and head on over to site structuring. If you have any questions about what keywords to use or just need suggestions, just ask. We are now going to create a html sitemap and xml sitemap. A html sitemap is a list of links going to each and every page on your site. A xml sitemap is a document that lists every page of your site, which can then be submitted to Google for crawling. You should have a link to your sitemap on every page of your site (the norm is to just put a link to it in the footer). Go to www.xml-sitemaps.com to create your free html and xml sitemap. Once you are finished, add the html sitemap to your website and put a link to it in the footer. Put the xml sitemap in your root web directory. To submit your xml sitemap to Google, follow the steps from my Basic SEO Guide.

Search Engine Optimization is a very tedious process that can consume a lot of time and money. This process, more familiarly known as “SEO”, is an internet marketing strategy that helps a website gain more search engine traffic. This means that by doing some SEO techniques, one can lure in more internet visitors to there websites via search engines such as: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask. For this article, we will be referring mostly to Google, as it IS the most popular search engine. SEO is a very powerful process that can, in time, multiply one’s internet revenues.

How does Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work?

Once a website makes use of some SEO techniques, it takes time for search engines to pick up on the positive changes. Google has its own “spider” that searches the internet one website to the next, and once it lands on a page it will update its search results. For example, let’s say a site had just done some SEO techniques to target the keyword “apples”. Before the site had made any changes, it did not show up on Google when someone searches for “apples”. A week after the changes, the Google “spider” landed on the website and noticed the changes. If the SEO was successful, then the website should show up higher on the search results for “apples”.

What kind of things does Google consider when ranking websites?

PageRank: Google has its own scoring system for websites, called PageRank. The higher a PageRank of a site, the better chance it has at higher search engine results. PageRank is a scoring system from zero to ten. PageRank is calculated from a number of different aspects.

1. Incoming Links
2. On-page SEO
3. Website Age
4. Site Structure
5. The rest is only known by the Google Engineers

Incoming Links: Google loves incoming links. An incoming link means that there is some other website that is providing a link to yours. The higher the PageRank of the website linking to you, the better the results. Also, the more incoming links a site has, the better the results. The good thing about incoming links is that not only do they serve as a PageRank boost, but they can be a good source of targeted traffic. Exchange links with websites related to your topic and you will have a higher chance of people clicking on your link. We will not dig deep into this topic for this Basic SEO Guide, as it is such a broad topic - however, we will later make some more advanced posts thoroughly explaining this topic.

On-page Optimization: I’m not going to go too much in to depth on this one because it can be a very deep topic. I will list some of the simple on-page optimization techniques that can be done.

1. Make use of the page titles (in the tags). Use some of your target keywords in your title tags, but do not spam them. If you spam your keywords when doing on-page optimization Google will penalize your website.




2. Make use of the description and keywords meta tags. Again, use some keywords in these tags but do not spam them. The keyword tags, although sounding extremely relevant, don’t carry much weight in SEO.




3. Link back to yourself. One of the simplest things you can do on your pages is link back to your own site with your choice of anchor text. It may sound strange having a page with a link going to itself, but believe it or not, Google likes it.




4. Make use of special importance tags. These include bold, strong, and heading tags. This is the prime area of on-page optimization because you want to use these special importance tags on your keywords, but to a point that it isn’t overdone. It is best to only target, at most, 2 keywords on any given page.




5. The filename of a page has been thought to carry some relevance to keyword rankings. This means that if you are targeting a keyword like “baseball gloves”, then it would be best to make your page filename baseball-gloves.php or baseball-gloves.html. It is better to use the dash marks than the underscore character because dash marks are seen as spaces to Google.

Website Age: It is a common belief that upon creation, a website has a certain amount of time until it can start gaining PageRank. This is a flaky subject, and cannot be proven. I for one believe that a website can start gaining PageRank the second the domain is registered. Obviously, your site will not start gaining PageRank until you start exchanging some links, but if you start this immediately – you should see PageRank early. For instance, 3 months ago I created a health related website. I exchanged links with a bunch of related websites. Currently (3 months since creation), my site is a PR 3. This is a great accomplishment for being such a young site.

Site Structure: Spiders require a clean structure in order to accurately crawl your website. Leaving errors and broken links on your site can negatively effect the crawling. The only things that spiders can do is travel to links. They cannot pass through forms (i.e. a username-password login form). In order to guarantee that there are no crawling problems, one should make use of the “robots” meta tag. If there is a page that contains a form, duplicate content, or errors, then you should put “nofollow, noindex” inside the content of the “robots” meta tag. This tag should go at the top of the page, along with all of your other meta. Furthermore, spiders seem to travel a depth of 3 links from any given page. This means if you have a page that is 4 or more pages from the index page, then they will not be crawled. To solve this problem, one should make use of a sitemap (XML). Simply go to XML Sitemaps to generate a sitemap for your site. Upload this file to the root directory of your website. After doing so, go to your Google Webmaster Tools (sign up for a free account if you haven’t already) and add your website to your dashboard. Then click add a sitemap, choose general web sitemap, and in the text box put “sitemap.xml”. Repeat the process every time you make updates to your site to increase the rate the spider visits your site.

I hope this Basic SEO Guide gave everyone a very simple explanation of what Search Engine Optimization is, and how to make some changes to your site. Continue checking our posts, as we will talk about more advanced topics later on.