Vital Facts about Home Business, and Ecommerce Search Engine Optimization
As an ecommerce site owner, you know that just having a site loaded with products isn’t enough to make your store a success. You need traffic just as a brick and mortar store does. Although there are numerous ways to bring traffic to your site, one important source of free traffic are the search engines, the three most important of which are Google, Yahoo! and Bing. The search engines can be a tremendous force driving natural traffic already predisposed to want your products if you understand some of the basics of search engine optimization (SEO). Although how search engines work can be quite complicated, the fundamental aspects of optimizing your site for best search engine exposure are not, and the time taken to understand how to use SEO is time well spent.
Once you have the basic business planning accomplished, sorting out what products and services you will offer, who your market audience is, the degree of demand, and product sourcing supply lines, you are ready to figure out a strategy for optimizing your site. Since we are talking about ecommerce–commercial online enterprise–this really should be part of your business plan, though implementation will take place after your site is live. Although there are many different techniques for SEO and numerous aspects to consider depending on your site and business model, the basic principles remain the same whether you have a shopping cart site selling baseball supplies or a site discussing English grammar. At its most basic level, SEO concerns optimization on the page and optimization off the page (or off-site).
The key on-page factors I want to discuss are keywords and site content. Keywords include the specific words and phrases people use to find your site. Since you are selling a specific products (or products), as much as possible you want your site pages to include the phrases that people type into the search engines when looking for your product line. You can position your keywords in a number of ways, such as through the use of the title, keyword, and description meta tags for your site and individual pages. The use of meta tags is somewhat controversial in terms of effectiveness. Webmasters generally use the basic tags used above because the search engines do sometimes use them to make ranking decisions.
The way in which you get your keywords in front of the search engines is through your content. Content includes all of the text used in your headlines, titles, menu names, category listings, articles, product descriptions, community news and so forth. Basically, all of the words on your pages that tell the search engines what your site is about. As an ecommerce merchant, many of your keywords will include product names and the search terms that people enter into search engines. Your content allows you to show off your keywords in order to accomplish two objectives–to get the search engines to see your content as the most highly relevant for your keywords and to provide easy to read, natural content to site visitors.
The key off-page optimization factor consists of getting links back to your site and its pages. By now you see that the quality and kind of content on your site will make worthwhile all of your hard work finding reliable product sourcing. For home business, this is an essential–however, we also need to go off-page for promotion. One very effective technique I’ll touch on concerns social networking and social bookmarking. Used properly, they can bring valuable attention and traffic to your site.
As an ecommerce site owner, developer, or entrepreneur, I strongly suggest you establish a business presence on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Linkedin. I recommend all four, but if you have to choose, then set up and maintain a profile of Facebook and Twitter. The reason you do this is to publish broadly your brand as an online business person. This allows you potential access to thousands of customers, and if you are a real business, there will be potential buyers interested and willing to pay for what you have to offer. Use of these social resources can greatly amplify your traffic and also have significant SEO benefit.
Social bookmarking sites and social news sites have long been used by website owners as an SEO and traffic strategy. As an ecommerce merchant, you can also take advantage of this resource. Social bookmarking allows you and other to create bookmarks back to specific pages on your site. When done on a large scale, you generate not only a large number of back links, but also increase traffic because people will find these links and follow them. Other sites that can be helpful are Squidoo and Hubpages. These are free, social publishing platforms. These can be helpful as feeder sites to your main domain. Also, you can send back links to these properties using social bookmarking and news sites. Whatever you do, don’t use these resources haphazardly. Decide if they should be part of your business model or not. If yes, then use them consistently. If no, then leave them alone and do something that you think would be more productive. Keep in mind that success demands your persistence and that you follow through with your business plan.
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