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For the most part optimizing your e-commerce website isn’t too different from optimizing any other site. There are however a few areas to focus on that will help drive visitors to your site. The following tips are guidelines for building an SEO friendly e-commerce site.

1) Always use alt tags in your header images because your header is one of the first things the spiders encounter. You may also consider adapting the alternative text on the logo to match the title tag of each page.

2) Always include your stores phone number on every page. This is a common sense tip that sometimes gets overlooked. Adding you phone number will also help your credibility.

3) Use leftside navigation. Most people are familiar with this standard form of navigation and it also acts as a site map for search engines to crawl through. Make sure to use either text links or images with alt tags otherwise they will be invisible to the search engine.

4) Give each product at least a short description (the longer the better) other than just a name and price. Search engines depend on text to determine what products you are selling.

5) Keep your layout consistent from page to page.

6) Use breadcrumb trails on the product pages to aid navigation and SE spiders.

7) Take time to create title and meta tags. Use them to differentiate your self from your competition (make them catchy) and provide effective descriptions in searches.

Each site should be optimized according to its industry. Depending on the level of competition, more steps may be needed to improve your rankings in the search engines. These tips are only a few of the many techniques used to optimize e-commerce websites at Comit Technologies.

Good Luck
Paul

By now everyone is probably familiar with Google’s battle against the Department of Justice to keep their search data private. While that issue has yet to be resolved it appears that a judge is now ordering Google to comply with a subpoena to hand over an individual’s entire Gmail account including all deleted messages. According to a recent news post on CNET News.com, the FTC intends to use the records to track down the defendant’s sizeable ($300 million) assets.

Cases of this nature continue to prove that there is a substantial amount of white collar crime taking place, and the criminals are not trying very hard to cover their tracks. With access to search data and email accounts, the Department of Justice has even more tools to track criminal activity. So, if you are using your Gmail account for criminal activity don’t bother deleting incriminating mail because it is still retrievable.

Writing great titles and headlines is, in my mind, one of the most important skills that an SEO should possess. They are used on everything from web page design to advertisements and link building (articles, blogs, etc.). Once you achieve that high ranking, you need to have a solid headline to draw traffic to your site.

Your headlines should interrupt and compel readers to focus on you material through all of the surrounding clutter. Creating an effective headline, however, can be a particularly daunting task when you consider the fact that most of the obvious/catchy headlines are already used by your competitors.

After giving it some thought, I have come up with a list of what I consider good qualities that every headline or title should have.

1. Headlines should interrupt the reader. Using powerful words such as: free, bonus, extra, automatic, and easy can effectively bring scanning eyes to a halt and interrupt reader’s train of thought.
2. Headlines should be concise. Get to your point as efficiently as possible. Everyone is in a hurry and they will not take the time to read long, wordy headlines.
3. Headlines should tempt and tease the reader. Regardless of the scope of your writing, use an idea that a specific group of individuals will react to positively or negatively. Your article may be unbiased, but a biased/narrow minded title will provoke individuals to read the rest of your message.
4. Headlines should cause a buyer to desire more. Arouse their curiosity and they will continue to read through your material.
5. Headlines should offer benefits as opposed to features. Create titles and headlines that offer solutions or rewards. Whether it is an answer to a question or a discount, it does not matter as long as the reader feels like they are gaining something extra. Try to suggest that they are getting some kind of a payoff.

The quality of your headlines and titles will directly affect the amount of traffic that your website receives. So spend some time creating them because they are the invitations to your websites.

Lately there have been a few weddings crashed by the search engines or at least that’s who is catching the blame.

Last week there was a post on Tech Dirt about lost wedding gifts being blamed on search engines. Apparently random consumers were lead to online wedding registries by the search engines and they purchased products from them without realizing that they were in someone’s wedding registry. This, of course, interferes with the registry by removing the purchased items from the lists. I thought this was funny and didn’t give it much thought until I visited the Grey wolf blog.

There is a recent post on Grey Wolf’s blog about wedding gift registries that were getting used by criminals to figure out when newlyweds were going on their honeymoons and then burglarize the homes while the owners weren’t there. This is a much more serious issue.

First off, the search engines are not at fault. There is no way that SE engineers would have considered wedding registries when they built their search engines. It does, however, present an opportunity to the SEO community.

I am sure that with a little bit of thought an SEO could think of several types of websites that do not want to be found by the search engines, and use their knowledge of SEO to un-optimize these websites (provide private websites).

From an SEO standpoint, website developers may want to consider creating easy, almost cookie cutter, websites that are not indexed by search engines just for events like wedding registries. There seems to be a market for them.

Here are a couple of ways to avoid having your wedding registry invaded by strangers:
1. Use robots.txt when designing your site to prevent search engines from indexing your site.
2. Make it evident on each page that the site is for purchasing gifts for an individual wedding.
3. Put all registry information on password protected pages to ensure the SE spiders and hackers don’t get to them.

Studies have shown that only 1 out 7 search engine marketers actually measured the ROI for their customer’s campaigns. These results are not surprising. I believe that this is evidence that many SEO’s are computer people and not business people, and to be truly effective, you must be a little bit of both.

Every legitimate SEO has at one time or another encountered clients who have had bad experiences with SEO firms and one of their primary concerns was their ROI. In a recent meeting I encountered a prospective client who was very leery about SEO in general. Apparently, his last SEO firm never delivered results, and their reporting was nonexistent.

Getting that top rankings is great, but what does it mean to a client in terms of ROI? Are they making a profit from their new rankings after the SEO campaign costs are considered?

There are several ways to determine ROI, but I will just mention a few that we use frequently at Comit Technologies.

The first statistic that I usually give a client (besides current SE rankings) is their general traffic information such as their number of unique visitors (not hits), their favorite keywords, inbound links, etc. This is all very important info that is easy to illustrate with graphs and such. Line graphs that show your unique visitor trends work well.

Conversion rates are next and they are probably one of the most important. They are easy to determine and they really help with fine tuning your online campaign. Often times traffic can increase while conversion rates suffer. When this happens, it is time to consider altering the focus of your SEO campaign or making changes to the website design or products and services. Maybe your visitors are misled by your keywords and your product isn’t what they are looking for. Or, your webpage may not be user friendly or aesthetically pleasing (they look distrustful). Even your advertised prices could be a deterrent.

Leads are another way to measure and determine SEO campaign success, but this is a statistic that clients are likely to notice on their own. Even so it is good to bring it to their attention to remind them of yet another SEO benefit.

I also recommend setting up a system that allows your clients to login and monitor their site. Some like to check their stats frequently and others just like to see for themselves if what you’re telling them is true.

Measures like the ones I’ve mentioned will give your services a monetary value and they can help your clients with their overall marketing campaigns. Providing regular/accurate ROI reports should be a no-brainer for every SEO firm. After all, it is easier to manage what you measure.