Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Just my thoughts on the subject I'm sure some experts could and will poo poo what I say, but it works for me, I always manage to get my sites ranking very well for searches in fact my main site I set out with the goal of doing well for 5 different keyword phrases and I have the no 1 spot on google searches for 4 of the 5 (number 3 for the other 1 but I will get it to 1)
Go and get a mug of tea or coffee and carefully read the next section, don't just scan over it or decide it's not important, it is the single most important part of your business being a success online!
If people can't find your shop what's the point in having a shop? Think about it, would you open a shop at the end of a long lane in a barn and not put up a sign at the roadside showing where your business is? Of course you wouldn't that would be ridiculous, but people do it every single day with shops on the internet, having a shop does not automatically give you customers, they have to be able to find your shop. Now of course there's numerous traditional ways of advertising your shop which all work (magazine, newspaper, flyer drops, posters, business cards left in suitable places etc.) But what I want to talk about here is SEO, making your shop friendly to search engines.
So what is SEO (search engine optimization). Please hold in mind this is a subject that many experts can spend 100s of pages talking about, this is very much so a basic guide. SEO is when you optimize your website pages by using appropriate source code and content throughout the website so that search engines can easily index your website and improve the website's ranking. SEO techniques are used for improving your position when a search is carried out on a specific keyword ( Keywords are the words that people search for when using a search engine) or keyword phrase.
Keywords and content on your site Meta tags - this requires editing a php file in your shopping cart if not sure ask on the e-commerce-forum as I'm sure a member will be able to point you in the right direction.
Meta-Data Overview: Meta-data is information about a web page that is not part of the ‘core’ content of the page. It provides useful information regarding the page to various pieces of software (a browser, search engine crawlers, etc.). From a structural perspective, meta-data is stored in a different part of the web page's HTML code than the usual web content that people see.
There are three primary pieces of meta-data that you should be concerned with.
1. Title: This is without a doubt, the most important piece of meta-data there is. One could further argue that it is the most important part of your web page, period . Why? Two reasons. First, the title is what is recognized to be the one piece of information that describes what the page is about . (Similar to a book title or article title). It shows up at the top of the browser when users are browsing your site. It is the default title your browser and book-marking sites will automatically use when people decide to ‘save’ your site for future use. Second, it is what search engines also use to figure out what the site is about. Compared to everything else on your page, it gets the most ‘weight’ from the search engines. Think of your meta-data title just like you would if you were authoring a book. The title is immensely important. Slipping relevant words in here is very important
2. Description: This is an ‘abstract’ or summary of the web page. Most SEO experts will advise you that you should ensure that important words and terms about your site should be crafted into the description somehow. I would agree. Another use of the description is that currently Yahoo! (and possibly other engines) use this provided description, or a part thereof, when your site ‘matches’ on a given search term and it has to show a small summary of your site below the title.
3. Keywords: This element provides a set of key terms or words that describe the web page. Many years ago, when search engines were first introduced, the keywords element was very heavily weighted towards determining the context of a web page. It was a quick way for the search engine to ‘figure out’ what a web page was about (instead of having to scan all the content). But, as time went on, people started abusing this ‘feature’. They stuffed words into the meta-keywords element that had nothing to do with the web page's content. (The rationale was that by stuffing ‘popular’ words, they'd draw some traffic). As a result of this abuse, the importance of the meta-keywords element has been greatly diminished. Search engines no longer look at this information as the definitive way to figure out context. However, most SEO experts continue to advise that it is important to use the keywords element because it is still used.
Relevant content Make sure the text of your web pages contain keywords and common phrases which people might search for. Be careful with the frequency of your keywords - you want to have them occur at least a few times if possible, but don't repeat yourself so much that the text becomes unnatural. The idea is to discretely spread keywords around without making it obvious. Make good use of Bold and H1, H2 tags etc.
I'm now going to give an example pretending we're promoting a "new age shop"
Bad example of home page intro text:
Welcome to abracadabra
Our items are all of a high quality and some of them are difficult to find anywhere else. We ship our items all over the world, please allow 7-14 days delivery. Now you would be shocked how many shops are as bad if not worse than that! Some don't have any text at all! Ok what's wrong with this example? well first off, it's too brief, ok there's an argument against writing too much as it will push your stock down the page and out of the direct line of sight. But please do tell people a bit more.
Lets break it down a bit more "Welcome to abracadabra" what does that tell search engines? (or your customer for that matter!) nothing is the answer, I'm sure your shop name is already on your logo and probably in your domain name, so nothing new. Also it's just been written in standard text no use of bold or H tags. Lets change it "Welcome to abracadabra wiccan supplies shop" ok now why's that better first of we will have used an H1 or H2 tag to show google it's importance on the page, we've also made it bold and perhaps more important than everything else, we're now telling search engines (and your customers) that the site is a wiccan supplies shop - hence we're already making it do better for that search term. People won't search for "abracadabra" but they will quite possible search for "wiccan supplies shop" with me so far?
Now lets look at the next part:
"Our items are all of a high quality and some of them are difficult to find anywhere else. We ship our items all over the world, please allow 7-14 days delivery." what's wrong with that? Words like "items" are useless, do you think people search for "items" no of course they don't, yet again you're not telling search engines or people what you're selling. You have a "shipping" page on your site put information about shipping in it! likewise never put an attempt at your terms and conditions on your home page! Now how could we make that better? Lets have a go:
Now lets use those heading tags again, use the next one down from the last one you've used, so if the first part (welcome to) was H1 lets make this H2:
Your one stop Wiccan Supplies Shop for all your wiccan and witchcraft supplies, from altar supplies to spell kits we have it all, many of our items are difficult to find such as spell ingredients that you just won't find anywhere else!
Now what have we done above, well we've slipped the term "wiccan supplies shop" in again assisting it yet more in searches for that keyword phrase. We've also slipped in "wiccan and witchcraft supplies" further backing up the "wiccan supplies" part of our original keyword phrase. We've also introduced a couple more terms "altar supplies" "spell kits" now notice we've kept the idea of suggesting some of our stock is difficult to find, but we've mentioned one area that may be the case for "spell ingredients" hence slipping in another phrase. Now lets add some more text and drop the H tags for this part:
We offer you a large range of wiccan products related to the witchcraft theme and new wiccan products are added to the catalogue every month. To assist you in your wiccan lifestyle and spell casting, we have a great selection of altar supplies , witchcraft herbs and spell kits here in our wiccan supplies shop.
Again notice how we've further backed up some existing keywords and keyword phrases and added some new ones, we've made them bold to tell search engines they're important. We've also introduced some new terms which will be links (note underlined) to categories in shops for example new wiccan products will link to "new products" in our shop but rather than just calling it "new products" we've made use of search terms by calling it"new wiccan products". altar supplies , witchcraft herbs and spell kits are all again keyword phrases but also links to the relevant categories in your shop.
So we've taken:
Welcome to abracadabra
Our items are all of a high quality and some of them are difficult to find anywhere else. We ship our items all over the world, please allow 7-14 days delivery. and changed it to:
Welcome to abracadabra wiccan supplies shop
Your one stop Wiccan Supplies Shop for all your wiccan and witchcraft supplies, from altar supplies to spell kits we have it all, many of our items are difficult to find such as spell ingredients that you just won't find anywhere else!
We offer you a large range of wiccan products related to the witchcraft theme and new wiccan products are added to the catalogue every month. To assist you in your wiccan lifestyle and spell casting, we have a great selection of altar supplies , witchcraft herbs and spell kits here in our wiccan supplies shop. Which is much better, this is just an example to base your home page text on it's just to show you what you should be doing, certainly I would be inclined to write a little more and put a bit more thought into it than I've just done, but I'm just trying to get the point across.
You've now done your first bit of keyword saturation without making it difficult for humans to read, let me show you.
Keywords and keyword Phrases used and how many times they've been used in that small piece of text.
Wiccan supplies shop - 3 times
Wiccan - 7 times
Supplies - 7 times
Shop - 3 times
Witchcraft - 3 times
Altar - 2 times
Spell Kits - 2 times
Spell Ingredients - 1 time
Spell Casting - 1 time
Spell - 3 times
Witchcraft herbs - 1 times
Surprised how many times we've slipped those keywords and phrases into such a small piece of text? Now they're just examples I've used, you may choose to use completely different words and phrases.
Links Make Page Rank
Back links (links from other websites to yours) are a vital part of SEO they tell the search engines how popular your website is, or should I say they tell the search engines how popular YOU want them to BELIEVE your website is.
Are all links equal? No they're not! There's basically two types of links:
One way links - simply a link from another website to your website
Reciprocal links - mutual links between two websites (simply I'll put a link to your website if you give me a link to mine)
One way links are what you want, they are worth considerably more than reciprocal links. Search engines aren't as stupid as you would like to think they are, they know reciprocal links are just simply used as a method to get more exposure, where as one way links are seen more so as people giving your website a big thumbs up.
So ok then you need lots of one way links, are they all equal, sorry they're not (life is never that easy is it) first thing to look at is the PR (google page rank) of the page the link to your website will be on. Even a PR of 0 is better than no link at all, but obviously the higher the rank the better it will be, see it simply as PR = how important google thinks your website is, 0 being not of much merit at all and 10 being the hub of the internet, now realistically 10's don't happen and you could really count 9 is being the top of the scale! Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's Page Rank is calculated. Page Rank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site don't normally harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.
No one really knows for sure how Page Rank works apart from Google, but a way of looking at it would be (the following text is in a different colour so you can easily ignore it if frightens you:) I have just copied it from somewhere else can't remember where now as it was a long time ago.
To calculate the Page Rank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))
That's the equation that calculates a page's Page Rank. It's the original one that was published when Page Rank. was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough.
In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.
We can think of it in a simpler way:-
a page's Page Rank. = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the Page Rank. of every page that links to it)
"share" = the linking page's Page Rank. divided by the number of outbound links on the page.
A page "votes" an amount of Page Rank. onto each page that it links to. The amount of Page Rank. that it has to vote with is a little less than its own Page Rank. value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.
From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The Page Rank. of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page will receive from it. So what's that really mean? When looking for a site to get a link from look at the google PR of the page your link will be on, generally you want pages with a PR of 2 or greater 4,5 & 6 is great, again as said earlier if you're going to be the only link from a PR4 or 5 page you're going to do very well from it, if there's 100s of links the worth will be diluted.
Now to confuse matters even more the words in your link and surrounding it are also relevant, if my site is selling fancy dress costumes orientated links which contain relevant words and/or from pages with relevant content will be worth more than a link from say a "car modifications" site.
Use some imagination in the titles you use in links, most people don't and that is often their biggest mistake, if your website is called "sexy costumes" links with a title "sexy costumes" is IMO poor, that's already your URL if you're not getting first page of google for it there's something very wrong, use lots of different link titles the more the better, but use relevant search terms for your titles like "nurse fancy dress costumes" or "pirate fancy dress costumes" etc. this reinforces with search engines how important your site is for those terms.
So how do you get links.
Two main methods:
(a) From websites of any form
(b) From directories (sites which essential are just a large directory of links)
I'd recommend you try to get as many from (a) natural / organic links from blogs and high value sites. They are sometimes worth more than hundreds of (b) directory links.
You will eventually exhaust (a) or yourself trying to find them. So you will use (b) hey there not worth as much as (a) but they still value. Again you can manually trawl the internet looking for free one way link directories or you can cheat a bit and use one of the many link creation services being offered by different companies online!
Want to see how many links your website (or a rival's) has I prefer using this to see:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ this can be a good method of finding your rivals best links!
~Karma Awarded ~ Turned into an article For the PortalThankyou Gothic Dropshipping
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