Search Engine Optimization Tips
When you are designing your website, you'll want your pages to look good and you want to have a design that is specific to what you are selling and your target customers. You'll also want to take into consideration how you will be ranked by search engines. Building your website with search engines in mind is often more important than the visual appearance of your store. Below are some tips for both SEO, search engine optimization, and design tips for driving traffic to your website.- Clear And Pronounced Calls-To-Action. Create clear buttons or steps for the customer to follow to purchase your products. The more clicks it takes to purchase a product, the more likely you are to lose the customer's interest and their business. You should be able to purchase products on your home page, or within one click of the home page. "Add To Cart" buttons and "Checkout" buttons should be high on your pages and should be a bright or contrasting color so that they stand out. It is also helpful to make the calls-to-action slightly larger.
- Meta Tags and Title Tags for Your Pages and Links. Title tags for your page should be in the HEAD section on your pages and should include the main keywords from your page. You should have unique title tags for each page. Meta keyword and meta description tags should also be unique per page. They should not simply be a description of your website, but they should include the keywords and descriptions which actually appear on each page. If a keyword does not appear on a specific page, do not include that keyword in the meta keyword field. Also, you will want to add title tags for all of your links.
- Keyword Focused File Names. You should include your top keywords in the file name for each page. For example, if you have a page for t-shirts, you could have the file name be simply t-shirts.html or you could have a file name which includes a few more specific keywords such as color-polo-t-shirts.html.
- Text Over Images. Anytime you have the option of having text or having an image with that text, make it straight text. You can always style your text with CSS and HTML. Search engines cannot read text which is part of an image so it is important that any text you use be part of your code.
- Content Content Content. Include text on your pages in as many ways as you can without getting in the way for your customers. Some websites will add additional text which is page specific into the footer section on their web page. This is useful because search engines see the text on the page, but it does not get in the way for your customers. Most customers won't even notice that the page specific text is there.
- Avoid Frames, JavaScript, Image Maps, Flash, etc. You will want to shy away from using lots of external content on your pages. Using frames takes multiple pages and combines them into one page. Search engines do not take all of those multiple pages in consideration when crawling your page, each section is searched and indexed separately. JavaScript is also difficult because it is an external file which is not included as part of the content on your pages.
- Link Building To Improve Traffic And Rank. Link building is great for spiders to find your website and to show that your website is more credible. If many websites are linking your website it shows that your website is useful or popular. When linking to other websites, make sure you are linking to relevant websites and including the website text in the link. Instead of using "Click Here" links, put "More Information On X Products."
- Update Content Or Blog. You should regularly add new content to your pages. Make sure that you are not adding fluff content, but that you are adding useful and relevant content. If you have a website where the content does not change frequently you should link to a blog. Linking to a blog which is updating constantly will help your search engine ranking. The same rules apply for a blog; don't blog what you are eating that day, keep the information focused.
Search Engine Optimization Tips Labels: Ecommerce Tools - Search Engine Optimization Tips