BUYING LINKS….OOOOO….ask any SEO about purchasing links and first thing they’ll say is BE CAREFUL. Purchasing links is a big No-No to Google and they (search engine) can penalize you for it by kicking your site out of the index or just lowering your rankings as a form of penalty.
Truth be told, link advertising has been around for a while and theres no reason why you should completely disregard it because of search engine optimization. How many good websites are there out there in your niche that you think you can get good traffic by placing a link on their website? If you think about it, that’s how the web grew to what it is, websites linking to each other and moving traffic across the web. The same idea still plays out the same today. Having a link in a good website in your niche is still key for traffic and we know it can help for your SEO.
I don’t like the word ‘buying links,’ I think of purchasing links as ‘link acquisition.’ Yes, me changing the name doesn’t make much of a difference to Google but at the end of the day, online retailing is a business. We want to grow our business and we want to rank as high as possible for the keywords we want. My advice is always stick to ‘WHITE HAT SEO’ (will write a post between the difference in SEOs soon) and be as ethical as possible when it comes to search engine optimization to achieve long-term results and make your SEO investment worth while.
How many times have you heard the expression ‘a picture is worth 1000 words?’ An image can literally sell your product. Many online retailers don’t’ have the resources to take real great pictures and put it up as the picture on their product page.
If your manufacturer has a great picture of the product you’re selling, great. By all means, you should use it. You should always use the best available picture of the product you’re selling to make sure its captures the visitors eye.
A great example of how pictures impact sales is on eBay. You see many sellers on eBay selling many of the same products for the most part, especially when it comes to name brand stuff. Research shows (eBay data) that sellers with better quality pictures AND quantity of pictures of their products results in better sales of that product.
The world is a big place although sometimes we say it’s a ‘small place.’ The fact of the matter is that if you’re in the United States, that is probably the largest market for your product, right? Well, that may not always be the case and you should be very aware about the products you’re selling and in what country you may be able to add more marketing resources.
The best way to go about targeting audience is another country is using paid search campaigns (Pay-Per-Click) and targeting different countries. For this, I would recommend starting a whole new campaign ONLY targeting a specific country to see how you are converting, etc. You can also find out what your traffic is currently like in other country using Google Analytics.
But first, let’s start the research process and it’s quite simple. If you don’t know yet, Google has a tool called GOOGLE TRENDS which offers you keyword data broken down by regions, cities, and languages.
As you enter the keyword of your choice as you’re doing your research, you will see a search volume index box which indicates the popularity of that term within a certain period of time.
Let’s use an example of the term XBOX 360. If you enter in the Google Trends tool as I did here, you’ll see CURRENTLY the #1 region is U.K., #2 is Mexico, and #3 is the United States, followed by Canada, and Australia.
Not only does it provide these important statistics on countries but it also shows you the latest and more important news on that item/product/service on the right hand corner. Ready to give it a try? Visit GOOGLE TRENDS
Do you know the power of email marketing? Are you sending out monthly or bi-monthly newsletters? A few years ago I kept putting off email marketing because it just seemed it was worth putting our resources and efforts more into other channels of marketing. We decided one day it was just time to really put email marketing into the broad scope of the marketing plan and BOOM, one of the best converting sales channels was seen.
ECOMMERCE EMAIL MARKETING TIPS
1- OFFER VALUE: Don’t just send out newsletters just to send out a newsletter and be greedy about sales. Offer value to your customers or readers that way they don’t unsubscribe. Also, offer value so they keep opening your newsletter. Offer special discounts, etc
2- DON’T MAKE IT TOO LONG: People have A LOT of emails to read, so the shorter you keep it, the more attention span you’ll have from your customer. Don’t write too much content as they will get lost and close your email out.
3- LINK. LINK. LINK: Do you want to make it easier for your customers to get to where you want them to get? Make sure to include a link in your email to where you want them to go.
4- PROOFREAD: We all make mistakes when typing so it is essential before sending out an email to thousands of people, have someone in your company (or two people) read and go through the email before you send it out.
There is nothing more important than making sure your eCommerce website converts visitors into sales, right? The ultimate goal for us online retailers is that every visitor performs an action in our website whether it’s buying a product, downloading something, signing up to the newsletter, or whatever other action you got going.
What happens when we have too many visitors visiting and not performing an action? If that’s the case, you have to definitely start looking into better web design optimization and also really look into your analytics and figure out where they are existing, etc. There is a way we can get these visitors (some of them/a percentage) to perform an action that will benefit into instant revenue (without any CHARGEBACKS!). This is by placing Google Adsense ads on your ecommerce website (product pages, etc.)
While this strategy may not be even an option for some online retailers, another consideration may be worth in the cards if you’re having too many exiting visitors without resulting in any action.
Here are 10 easy-to-dos and keys for success in the search engine optimization field of your ecommerce website. We talk a lot about ecommerce search engine optimization in our blog but here we’ll list some real easy and important ones for you to check and make sure you’re doing. Let’s step into
ECOMMERCE SEO:
1- FILL OUT ALL SEO FIELDS IN PLATFORM: Your ecommerce platform will have fields for SEO. The Fortune3 platform (ours) is very focused on these fields but it is very important you fill these fields out with your most important keywords.
2- CREATE YOUR OWN PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS: Many online merchants will copy and paste product descriptions from other websites. This is a No-No! Make sure you write your own original content for every product description. Yes, it may take longer but the returns SEO wise will pay off.
3- EACH PAGE (PRODUCT) MUST HAVE UNIQUE TAGS: Avoid having the same meta tags repeated anywhere on your website. Each product is different, whether it’s the same product in another color, that is a new product. Each Title, Description, and Keyword tag should be different on all pages.
4- USE KEYWORDS IN URL: We’ve touched on this many times before and can’t stress enough the importance. Your product URL must have it’s relevant keywords for better rankings.
5- CONTENT. CONTENT. CONTENT: This may go back to point 2 somewhat but many online retailers think putting up a product page, the picture, and add to cart button will do the job. For better optimization for buyers and search engine optimization, WRITE GOOD QUALITY CONTENT. Not just 2 sentences. Write as much information as possible on the product.
First of all, if you have not created a Facebook fan page for your business, you’re lagging behind on a big trend that can really help the perspective customers may have on your ecommerce store. Facebook can have a VERY good impact not only on sales but customer loyalty.
We’ll show you how create a Facebook for page for e-commerce in an up-coming blog post. eMarkter.com has reported some GREAT insight and statistics on what a Facebook fan is worth to brands which can really tell the story about how truly valuable it is to have a page.
Search engine optimization success will come with how well you also optimize your shopping cart. You can optimize your shopping cart for two different elements: People (sales) and Search Engines (SEO).
On this post we’ll focus on shopping cart optimization for search engine optimization and certain things you can do to try and optimize your shopping cart as much as possible.
Let’s look at optimization is several parts:
A: META TAGS: This comes down to the basics of search engine optimization. Make sure your meta tags are well optimized PRODUCT BY PRODUCT. Each product must have unique title, description, and keyword tags. It is also CRUCIAL that in this process, you make your product URL string optimized the product keyword you are using. For example if you are selling red socks on your website and your domain is socksusa.com, what you want to do for that one product, let’s say they are large socks, it would be like this: socksusa.com/large-red-socks.html.
B: INTERNAL LINKING: Each page in your shopping cart (as most do already since they are templates) internal linking is key optimizing the page. Make sure your categories are well broken down.
In 2009, eCommerce went stagnant in growth for the first time ever. As the recession in the United States affected the whole economy (all levels of the economy) and it also affected the world-wide economy, e-commerce for the first time didn’t see a positive growth.
Now entering the 3rd quarter of 2010, eCommerce is back on its way to see a growth in 2010. Not all is ‘peachy’ for all sectors of the economy as the latest eMarketer article explains that it is affluents that are leading the way to ecommerce recovery.
“Affluents are expected to contribute to that growth by beginning to satisfy pent-up demand. Online consumers have long been more affluent than the average American, and studies suggest affluents are recovering from economic problems more quickly than the general population.
Your customers are the biggest asset to your business and in return, you should always have them in mind to please first. Keeping customers loyal can make the difference between being around for 1 year, to sticking around 100 years.
Let’s take a real-life example of a company that is started a micro-site to offer more exclusive deals and develop more of a community. Big giant wine retailer Win.com has put out a press release today:
“Wine.com, the #1 online wine retailer, today launched a flash-sale shopping site for premium wines called WineShopper. WineShopper is a members-only retail site that offers exclusive wine deals in limited quantities for up to 72 hours. Through daily private sales, WineShopper gives fast-acting consumers discounts up to 70 percent off on a first-come, first-serve basis. WineShopper will stock and sell a wide range of wines, from big brands like Silver Oak and Veuve Clicquot, to smaller boutique names from around the world.
