Keywords are the descriptions of your website that help search engines like Google understand what you are selling and who it should push your way. How can you improve your ecommerce website’s SEO with keywords? Here are our tips:
Keywords are the heart of a website’s SEO strategy. Keywords help shape and define what your site is all about. For ecommerce websites, your keywords should be focused on your product: what is it that you sell? What keywords will your customers search for in order to find you?
With keywords, its important for them to be real. There is no advantage to stuffing your page with “Britney Spearks” or “London 2012”, etc. Focus on what your site actually offers, or visitors will just bounce straight back out of your site. Keywords are how your potential customers will find you.
The process of choosing your keywords is more than just thinking about what customers will search for. We suggest:
1. Create a list of potential keywords (relevant words, but not too common terms either).
2. Enter the proposed keywords into keyword research tools (such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool), to determine how strong they are.
3. Research your keyword list again, creating two lists: one of broad keywords (ie “clothing”, “toys”, etc) and targeted keywords (ie “blouses”, “jeans”, “toddler toys”, transformers”, “star wars toys”, etc).
4. Include them on your page – make sure it reads naturally, but try to include 3-4 related keywords per page (analyse your keyword density by entering a page here: http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/)
Some more useful tools:
Google’s Contextual Targeting Tool can also help you come up with strong keywords (the tool used to be called the “Wonder Wheel”).
Google Trends is another handy tool which helps to find the most popular trends being searched on Google at any given moment.
Your keywords should be used in your website copy, but also included in your site’s title tags and other tags. Your website’s title tag is usually your company or website name. Instead of just using your company name, also ensure it clarifies what the content and subject of the site is – describe it.
This tag, known as an
tag, should signify the main topic of the page, and then your lower tags, such as , should reflect the more detailed content.
Your images should also use alt-tags (alternate tags) to describe what the images are for. Google cannot “see” images, so you need to describe them (using keywords!). Also name your images with relevant key words (and separate words with dashes rather than underscores).
Finally, it is important to also include keywords in your URLs. Search engines prefer websites that contain relevant keywords in each individual web page’s URL. For example, a URL such as http://www.shoesforall.co.uk/shoes/men/sneakers.aspx will perform better than http://www.shoesforall.co.uk/products/13123.html
