eCommerce Blog

Top Ecommerce Store Design SEO Tip #5: Train team members to ensure all contributions to the store are made with SEO in mind

jposton — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:13:22 +0000

In one of our earlier blogs, Top Five Seo Tips for Yahoo! Ecommerce Storefront Owners, “Train team members to ensure all contributions to the store are made with SEO in mind“ is listed as a top tip to help boost your Yahoo! online store SEO.

Every online store owner would love to visualize their store positioned naturally on the first page of Google search results, but it’s going to take more than the regular SEO tweaks to make this a reality. It’s got to be a total team effort. Since most key departments behind online store operations tend to have some measure of direct influence over the site, they all need to keep in mind that being found naturally in search is a priority.

Everyone has a role to play:

• The marketing department – SEO needs to be a priority, period. Long term and short terms goals must be set, acted on, and measured. There needs to be at least a small team devoted to this – a group that can help keep focus on SEO as a priority.

• The product marketers - Many times, the content on product pages comes from standardized product copy that carries a marketing focus – or by a group of people putting this content together if a company is selling their OWN products. Good language and descriptive copy is important, but so is technically functional copy from an SEO perspective. Those that create content need to keep SEO in mind, or create alternate versions of product and section copy that are specific to the web.

• The visionaries – Grand decision makers who drive information architecture, usability, branding, design, and functionality need to keep SEO in mind. Decisions made that affect the user experience also affect SEO.

• The content creators – The product marketers aren’t always going to hand over specifics about what should go in the page title, headline, and meta description for all products in the store. And they will almost never hand over content for section pages. The team that ensures that content is populated on ALL areas of the store have a huge role in SEO.

• The people that work in the store day to day – Those that are in the store with regularity need to keep a close eye on empty fields, anomalies in the store, and standards that are set by the team. No one knows what is currently in the store more than the people in there day to day making it happen.

• The programmers – The code that makes the store function needs to be tidy and clean. A broken piece of code or a bad programming decision can cause issues that directly affect SEO.

It might take some time to coordinate efforts and to ensure effective communication between departments, but once everyone is focused and doing their part, the reward will be imminent and substantial.

There’s only one caveat: A solid all-departmental hands-on-deck SEO strategy will bring in the traffic, but make sure usability hasn’t been compromised from the heavier focus on SEO. Once traffic arrives, customers should be finding exactly what they were searching for and then be able to easily navigate their way through to check out.

If you need experts who make it their specialty to train team members to work together on optimizing SEO within their respective roles and departments, contact FastPivot.com for an initial consultation.

To receive the latest ecommerce custom store design and development news, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Be sure to stay tuned to The FastPivot.com Blog and sign up to receive the FastPivot.com ecommerce newsletter too!

Full recording of “Shopping Engine Success for Yahoo Stores” webinar now available

jposton — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:40:22 +0000

FastPivot.com’s President, Matthew Ledford, and Director of Strategy, Grant Henry discussed how to properly track shopping engine campaigns with Yahoo! Analytics and what metrics to keep an eye on during the Shopping Engine Success for Yahoo Stores webinar held this past February 24, 2010.

A full recording, complete with slides, of the webinar is embedded below (*free access).

Top Ecommerce Store Design SEO Tip #4:Remove SEO Roadblocks– domain, code, layout, or scripting issues

jposton — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:49:32 +0000

In one of our earlier blogs, Top Five Seo Tips for Yahoo! Ecommerce Storefront Owners, “Removing SEO Roadblocks – domain, code, layout, or scripting issues“ is listed as a top tip to help boost your Yahoo! online store SEO.

When most people use onsite optimization tactics with SEO, they usually only make changes to the content itself, when many behind-the-scenes factors could very well be causing hiccups. Those hiccups deter a search engine crawler’s ability to follow and understand the structure and content of what you are putting out for actual humans to read.

This checklist below highlights some often ignored behind-the-scenes factors:

Potential domain issues

• When you type in http://yourstore.com does it forward to http://www.yourstore.com?
• Are other versions of your domain forwarding correctly?

If not, then you could be thinning your SEO presence online – or creating duplicate content issues.

Internal linking strategy

•   Are you positioning more important links near the top of the page?
•   Do you link to all pages from all pages? You’ve heard the phrase, “If you show everything, you show nothing.” The same can be said for your internal linking strategy.
•   Are you using no follow tags on links that point to pages considered unimportant from an SEO perspective?
•   Do you have breadcrumbs in your store?
•   Have you taken advantage of strategic linking in the footer?

Internal linking not only builds a healthy store hierarchy from a visitor’s perspective, but it gives the search engines an idea of what to consider important in a store.

Basic coding issues

• Have you run any tools on pages to detect unclosed tags, load errors, or just bad code?
• Do you have an extraneous numbers of lines making up the source of a page? Can this code be optimized?

Pages may load somewhat well in some browsers, but remember to test pages often to make sure they are loading cleanly and ensure that pages are programmed as cleanly as possible.

Javascript and CSS

•   Are there currently CSS or Javascript errors on any of your pages?
•   Do you have all Javascript located in external files?
•   Do you have all CSS located in an external file?
•   Do you have important links embedded inside Javascript?

Clearing up some “behind-the-scenes” SEO roadblocks may require an additional technical skill, beyond what the average SEO expert may have, so it’s definitely worth asking your programmers to check for code issues before calling it a day.

In conclusion, getting the most out of your SEO efforts requires an ongoing, multi-pronged strategy that doesn’t just stop with creating great keyword-rich content and getting external links pointing to it. If you need SEO experts that can take you to the next level, contact FastPivot.com for an initial consultation.

FastPivot.com to offer social media workshop near Asheville NC

jposton — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:20:43 +0000

The Small Business Center in Marshall NC will host Jonathan Poston of FastPivot.com who will provide a hands on workshop for social media marketing for small business owners and entrepreneurs on March 22 from 6-9 p.m in the VSBC. This is a great opportunity to learn how to integrate social media with your ecommerce store.

Though some computers will be available, attendees should bring a laptop if they have one. Space is limited. Admittance is free.

Contact Jennifer Flynn at 649-3444 or email marshallncstep@gmail.com for more info.

Top Ecommerce Store Design SEO Tip #3: Deploy Off-Site Link Building Techniques

jposton — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:25:17 +0000

In one of our earlier blogs, Top Five Seo Tips for Yahoo! Ecommerce Storefront Owners, “deploying off-site link building techniques” is listed as a tip to help boost your Yahoo! ecommerce store SEO.

Why link build?

It’s simple: It’s another form of social validation: the more other sites link to your online store site, the more important search engines will think your store site is.

One might assume that good content should be king when it comes to being found through organic search, but that’s not completely true. With so many systems out there auto-generating content, search engines have been forced to find other ways to determine website reputability. One way they do this is by creating an importance rating based on the number of one-way links pointing into any given website. Google’s PageRank scoring system is known around the world. To some experts, achieving a great PageRank score is the primary goal of Search Engine Optimization. In short, the more permanent links pointing into your domain by reputable and relevant sources, the better your Google Pagerank score and the more you improve your organic positioning in general.

How to get other websites to link to your site?

Getting listed on directories

Buying spots on web directories is one of several methods of getting permanent links pointing to your store. But buying your way in isn’t as valuable as it used to be. Over the years, search engines have become more adept at recognizing and ignoring link farms that have no inherent value to visitors. Although this practice still works to some extent, the value just isn’t what it was.

Purchasing a link spot on a relevant local business directory is automatically more relevant than many link farms. Many times, local business directories will list your site at the basic level for free. These directories are legitimate resource sites set up to help consumers find their desired product, service. There may even be a community product/service rating/review system integrated into the directory, which further validates that directory as being legitimate.

Write for newspapers and magazines

These days newspapers and magazines aren’t able to afford writers like they could in the “age of print.” They’re still starving for content, but many times can’t pay freelancers enough to write niche articles. If an expert columnist offers to write a quality piece in exchange for a post-article bio and business link, it is a win on both sides.

Hyperlink your press releases

In today’s media, many things that go in print will first be pasted into the online news section. Make sure to include hyperlinks in your press releases, so any information you send the press can link back to you.

Although there are many other ways to get your links out there that we won’t cover in this blog, it’s important to remember to manage the time you spend building links and updating your store’s content. At the end of the day, if your ecommerce store doesn’t include link-worthy content, you’ll see all your hard earned link referral matrix crumble in a fraction of the time it took to build.

Some final link building reminders:

•    Remember links are more important than large amounts of content, but you won’t get those links without great content. They go hand in hand.
•   Keep in mind the anchor text on your links if you have control over that. For example, if your landing page link is a page all about large argyle socks, try and make sure the text that is actually linked is “large argyle socks” – not something like “click here”.
•    Keep up with your competitors’ links by going to Google and typing link:http://www.yourcompetitor.com in the search box.

If all of this information seems daunting, contact the FastPivot.com SEO experts for a custom SEO help solution.