Search Engine Optimization

Today I am going to go over 3 of the most basic search engine techniques. I apologize to you, if you already know these, but I am always surprised to see that a lot of website owners that do not know these basics.  My background is in eCommerce, but these will work for any website, eCommerce website or Blog.

First of all, let me say that I always find it odd that so many website owners will look to third party companies for search engine optimization instead of just learning the basics and putting a little work into it.  After all, even when you hire an SEO company, they end up sending you a large discovery type form to fill out, or they end up asking you a ton of questions about your visitors, products and company.  I think you, the website owner, can do a better job than 98% of the SEO companies on the planet. The reason is simple… You know your customers, you know your products and most importantly you already know the your keywords.

So, let’s dive in.

Title Tags, Product Names and Filenames:

Technically these could all be separate subjects with pages of info, but in this post I will just touch on them all briefly.

Title Tags:
The title tag is what your visitors see on the search engine listings. Here is an example:

You will notice that the title tag is what appears in the search engine listing as the clickable link. It is extremely important to show relevant and descriptive keywords here. The title tag will not only affect your search engine listings, but also your click-thru rates. A common question I get is should you use your company name in the titles. My answer is it is fine to do this, but put it at the end. Save the beginning of your title for your keywords. I will get into how to choose the best keywords a little later.

Product Names:
You should always use <h1> tags to display your product names, blog post names or article names. I do this because it shows the search engines that these keywords are more important that they rest on the page. I also try to limit the use of the <h1> tag to the most important keywords on the page.

The same thing goes for the product name as the title in terms of being descriptive and using the best keywords. When I say use the “best keywords” I mean use the words that people will search for more. I will get into how to select your best keywords below.

Filenames:

Filenames are just another way to use your keywords in a descriptive manner. In the case above the REI site doesn’t use descriptive keywords, but it still shows up well in the listings. This just means that SEO is about a combined effort and 1 change to your site might not get you the results you want, but several small changes just might do the trick. If your eCommerce system can handle custom filenames then you should use a filename like this “bob-sport-utility-stroller” for the product page filename for this product.

Now I will touch upon how to select the best keywords:
A good resource that I always use to see what terms are searched for more is the Google Keyword Tool. This tool will allow you to search for keywords and see what the search volume is for that term and similar terms. After using this tool you will find what terms are used more and you can setup your titles, product names and filename using the keywords that could have the potential to drive more traffic to your site.

Unique Content
When I say unique content, I don’t mean copy and paste your information from several websites instead of just one. I mean actually take some time and write your content the old fashioned way. I have seen so many eCommerce sites struggle with this since it takes time and skill to write unique product descriptions for all your eCommerce sites products. Plus the temptation to just copy/paste from the manufactures website or a competitor is SO EASY.. The most common thing I hear is “I will just copy/paste the product descriptions from my competition to get the site up and running and then I will go and change them later. I hear it all the time and most never get around to writing unique sales copy and most who do not use unique content end up not being that successful.

Unique content is so important because the search engines know when you use  content from another website and I am pretty sure they know where you got it from. I use a site called Copyscape.com to check for duplicate copy, mostly to see when other people copy/paste from my sites.

Here is an idea. Google should, if they don’t already,  give you flattery points in the search algorithm for every time someone likes your text enough to copy/paste it and use it as their own. Maybe I will email Matt Cutts with that one.  Or I can just wait a couple days until he gets his Google alert email with this post. If your not sure what a Google Alert is visit an older post on how to track your buzz.

Link Text:

Last but not least I will touch upon Link text. This is the descriptive text used in your link.

<a href=” http://www.rei.com/product/751322”>Click Here</a> to see the BOB Utility Stroller..

In this case “Click Here” is the link text, and is an example of bad link text. A good example of link text would be

View the <a href=” http://www.rei.com/product/751322”>Bob Sport Utility Stroller</a>

I would recommend using descriptive link text to link within your own site as well as encouraging other websites to do the same.

Well this post ended up being longer than I planned and that was just a brief explanation of 3 of the most basic elements of SEO. I hope you got a good understanding of these, so you can go and spend a few minutes or a few hours optimizing your own website.  While I was writing this I looked at my new blog code and noticed that I could some help as well. Maybe I should take some of my on advice and get to work on SEO.

I know I only covered the surface of 3 SEO tips here and I will get into more detail on these as well as other ways to optimize your site in the future. Leave a comment if you have a basic SEO tip that I left out or if you have any questions.

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