It’s important to understand the fundamentals of search
As an ecommerce professional, it’s essential to have some SEO awareness to maximise your returns. With the basics covered, your business will appear in search engine results whenever someone types an enquiry relating to your business and the things it sells – how high you appear in the list depends on a wealth of other factors.
By Suzie Larcombe
In this article we will explain:
- What’s meant by SEO
- How important SEO is to your business
- What the search engines look for
- What’s new in SEO
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. As the owner of an ecommerce business, SEO is likely to be pretty high on your business agenda. At the end of the day, SEO is what will make your site visible to those all important potential clients when they carry out a search engine query.
In a nutshell, SEO is what will get your business noticed by the people looking to buy your product or service online. In most instances, when people speak or write about SEO, they typically focus on what Google is looking for because Google has the lion’s share of searches (estimated at around 90% of the market).
What is SEO?
With tens of billions of websites published on the World Wide Web, it’s SEO that acts as the GPS for consumers and product and service providers. Without SEO, the web would be a complete muddle of sites, all jockeying for position. If you think of a range of back street shops in a huge city that are never found by anyone unless there are well planned signposts, you’ll start to get the notion of how important SEO is for online businesses.
SEO involves a whole range of techniques that you can use to get your ecommerce site moving towards the top of the search engine ladder in the hope that the people searching will click through, visit your site and take up your offer. Where your site appears on the search results is called your ranking and if you’re relying on being found in searches, you need to become pretty much obsessive with your ranking.
Some of the most important things that affect your ranking include:
a. Keywords. Appropriate use of relevant keywords in your domain name, titles, header tags and content will all help you get, and keep search engine attention.
b. Links. If you have seriously high quality sites pointing to your site, you’re more likely to gain respect from the search engines.
c. How up to date your site is. Keeping your website fresh, with new, interesting and relevant copy is a great way to keep the search engines happy.
How important is SEO?
How important SEO is to your business depends on various factors such as:
1. Whether or not you trade only online.
2. How competitive your market is.
3. What other promotional activities you get involved in.
If you’re relying 100% on online sales, then SEO is pretty much an essential element of your success. If your online store is a backup to a high street presence, then that need may well be reduced. At the end of the day, only you can decide how important online visibility is to your profitability.
What do the search engines look for?
When a new or updated website or web page gets published to the web the goal of the designer or site owner is to attract the search engine crawlers or spiders to assess its relevance and importance for the relevant search query.
When the crawlers examine these new sites they’re looking to index links, images, content and videos amongst other things to make sure they are relevant, related and high quality responses to the search terms. Once they’ve done that, they’ll rank the page accordingly.
What’s hot on the SEO front?
The hottest thing to come out of Google recently is Penguin 2.0. This is the latest in their attempt to get really good at sniffing out sites that don’t deliver on their search engine promises or claims. Content and linking are the main topics on the go right now.
The key thing when producing content for SEO is to make sure it “does what it says on the tin”. The days of publishing rubbish that will inappropriately attract searchers to your site are pretty much over. Gone also are the days where a load of irrelevant links meant your site was popular. Only good quality, relevant content and links are being rewarded these days.
Google in particular are constantly updating their methodology and algorithms to make sure that only good quality sites gain ranking. It’s well worth bearing this in mind when planning your strategy.
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