Vital Facts about Home Business, and Ecommerce Search Engine Optimization

Customer traffic is vital to any commercial website, and as an ecommerce site owner this is no less true. As important as product research and product supply is to the success of your business, you need targeted traffic to stay solvent. By targeted traffic, I mean visitors who are already interested in and possibly already wanting to buy what you have to sell. The three major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing can be an invaluable source of free traffic if you pay attention to certain basic principles of search engine optimization (SEO). I don’t want to suggest that you rely only on search engine traffic, but there is no reason not to take advantage of what they have to offer.

A search engine strategy should really be part of your business plan, though before tacking the search engines you need to have more basic points worked out such the products you are selling, overall demand, and product supply sources. Once you have the basic business planning worked out and your site is on the road to launch, you want to have a plan of action for natural search. There really is no cookie cutter approach to SEO, though the fundamentals will hold true for just about any site. After all, SEO comprises the knowledge of how to give the search engines what they want, which really involves you telling the search engine what your site is about in the most precise and efficient manner possible. As such, we will be looking at on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

The key on-page factors I want to discuss are keywords and site content. Keywords include the specific words and phrases people use to find your site. Since you are selling a specific products (or products), as much as possible you want your site pages to include the phrases that people type into the search engines when looking for your product line. You can position your keywords in a number of ways, such as through the use of the title, keyword, and description meta tags for your site and individual pages. The use of meta tags is somewhat controversial in terms of effectiveness. Webmasters generally use the basic tags used above because the search engines do sometimes use them to make ranking decisions.

The principle means of positioning your keywords and phrases is accomplished through your site’s content. This would include all the words, phrases, and text used to inform visitors and potential customers about your products, business, news, and anything else that could be of interest to your targeted customer population. In other words, the content comprises the articles, product descriptions, advertising, blog posts, RSS feeds and anything else you publish on your site. This allows you to show case specific key words so that it catches both the attention of the search engines and the human visitors you want to draw to your ecommerce site. The art of “show casing” specific words and phrases is the practice crafting content so that it both addresses the needs of your targeted audience and also acts as search engine bait through skilled use of the language and choice of words.

Off-page optimization generally concerns the number and quality of links pointing back to your site from either other websites or from your own internal pages. Back links are possibly the most important element of SEO, and while a site with excellent on-page optimization has a definite advantage, with enough back links you can force an excellent page rank regardless of content. As an ecommerce site owner, back links can play a key part in focusing search engine attention on your pages and content. You can actually control this by choosing the sites you link back from, the kind of anchor text used, how you use link networks, and where you point your back links. Practical ways of backlinking include mass publication of RSS feeds, mass publication of videos across many video publishing sites, submission of articles to directories, use of social publishing platforms such Squidoo and Hubpages. Proper use of social bookmarking and social news sites is also effective in producing back links when done on a large enough scale.

Many online marketers now establish a business presence on sites such as Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. These allow easy, network access to thousands of potential customers and a potential source of back links to your sites. You do have to spend the time to build a presence that people can trust. To some degree you accomplish this by the quality of content you publish. People will know you by your words. If they like what they find, they will follow you to your principle site.

Other resources that you should probably take advantage of are social bookmarking and social news sites. Bookmarking sites simply allow the creation of a bookmark back to your site’s pages by you and others. Each bookmark is a link back. Social news sites are sites such as Digg, Propeller, and Reddit. These allow you to provide a description of a site page and also provide a link back. You can also bookmark your social news site entries. Done on a large scale, these create many back links and also many announcements of your site’s content. Social publishing platforms are also helpful–two prominent examples are Squidoo and Hubpages. Whether or not use of these sites would fit your particular business model and SEO strategy, I can’t say. However, whatever you do, don’t do it half heartedly. Decide which SEO and traffic strategies are practical and right for you and then go all out and shoot for as big a scale as possible. Remember, your success requires that you persist and follow through with your planning.

Learn how to use SEO for ecommerce and discover great tips on product sourcing for home business.