Search engine optimization is a never-ending headache for many
ecommerce entrepreneurs. Regular algorithmic changes with Google, Bing,
and Yahoo can mean that the efforts you make today could be undone
tomorrow, particularly if your SEO strategy is gimmicky and based on
trying to “trick” the engines to liking you. Plus it seems that no
matter what you do to improve your content and design, there is always
something left that could still be done to make things more effective.
With the start of a new year right around the corner, though, it is a
good time to sit down once again and take a look at your SEO strategy,
particularly if you’re a solo entrepreneur that manages his or her own
SEO efforts in-house.
The Holy Grail of SEO is high PageRank backlinks (i.e. inbound links
from other websites to yours), but they are hard to get, are driven by
quality content, and take months or years to culture. Creating quality,
user-valued, brand-centered content should always be the cornerstone of
your SEO efforts, but there are simple, easy on-page things that you can
do to make your website’s pages more attractive to search engines.
Revisit Keyword Research
You’re likely already well aware of the important search keywords on
which you would really like to rank strongly. Still, it never hurts to
do a bit of fresh keyword research to insure that your list of target
keywords is up to date.
It’s unrealistic to think that the vast majority of relatively small
websites are going to rank well on thousands of keywords. It isn’t
unrealistic, however, to rank well on several dozen keywords,
particularly if many of them are not too competitive to start with. And
just because a particular keyword isn’t all that competitive doesn’t
mean that it isn’t lucrative.
For the longest time, Google offered a great, free keyword research
tool – called (unsurprisingly) the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You
could use this tool even if you didn’t use AdWords. The replacement for
this tool is the Google Keyword Planner, which is available under “Tools
and Analysis” in your Google AdWords account.
Even a few minutes with a keyword research tool might be of value in
focusing your attention on new opportunities for keyword “strategy,”
whatever that might be.
The goal is to get together a list of anywhere from 100 to 300
keywords and key phrases that you believe are directly related to the
products that you sell and that are descriptive of the sorts of things
in your web store. Some of these will no doubt be “short tail” and
generic (e.g. you sell garden hoses but want to rank on “gardening”) but
most will be “longer tail” and more specific and oriented to particular
products and categories (e.g. “expandable lightweight garden hoses”).
Formulate a Landing Page Strategy
From there, the next step is to build a simple spreadsheet with your
targeted keywords in the first column, one keyword per row of the
spreadsheet.
In the next column of the spreadsheet, go ahead and list the page on
your website that should be the preferred landing page for someone who
searches on that term.
Imagine that you sell birdhouses, for example. An important keyword
for you might be “brass birdhouses,” in which the landing page for that
term might be your category page for brass birdhouses. The term “cedar
birdhouses,” by contrast, would be targeted to your category page for
cedar birdhouses.
A more particular search like “small barn wood birdhouse” might
target a particular product page that closely fits that description.
Likewise, a branded search for a particular product (“Dunwood Classic
Redwood Birdhouse”) should target that particular product page.
One implication of this exercise might be the discovery that a term
that you think is important doesn’t have an appropriate landing page on
your site. For example, imagine that your birdhouse web store currently
only categorizes products by the materials from which they are made.
Nonetheless, imagine that you’re interested in targeting visitors who
search according to the size of birdhouses (e.g. “large birdhouse,” or
“small birdhouse”). In that case, you should consider creating a new set
of product categories that correspond to the keywords that you care
about. In addition to the value in terms of SEO,
presenting your products in terms of the categories that consumers are
considering can really influence conversion rates and time-on-site.
Another possible outcome of building this spreadsheet that might
surprise you is that you find that you’re almost always targeting the
home page of the site. Although it is tempting to want visitors to
always come through the front door, the truth is that landing on a
relevant interior page on the site is going to be more effective as a
selling tool for many, many searches.
It’s also easier to optimize an interior page for a particular
longer-tail search term compared to trying to optimize the home page for
every term you care about. And optimizing interior pages on various
related long-term search terms will have the added benefit of
potentially raising the overall visibility of higher-level pages on
broader term searches.
Optimizing Page Titles
Now it’s time to add a third column to your spreadsheet. Go ahead and
type out the current page title for each website page that you have
listed in your spreadsheet.
Page titles are important to search engines, and they are relatively
easy to optimize. The question at this point is simple: Is the current
page title adequate to your SEO goals, given that you’re trying to rank for that particular keyword?
Minimally the page title should be descriptive of the content of the
page, and include usage of the exact keyword you’re targeting. For
example, if you’re trying to get a category page to rank on the term
“brass birdhouses” then the title of that page should include the term
“brass birdhouses.”
Ideally, the term should also appear early in the title. “Brass
Birdhouses for Your Feathered Friends” is going to be more effective
than “Birds Love Brass Birdhouses” – though I doubt either of those page
titles are all that great.
Lastly, take a look at the length of the page title. It’s tempting to
use lots of words in the page title, but hold the length to 70
characters. Search engines will use your page titles in the search
engine results page when they serve your page up as a result. But the
engines will truncate the result if it goes more than 70 characters.
Good titles will be keyword-rich, but not keyword-stuffed,
descriptive of the content on that page, under 70 characters, and
encourage a user to click on that result, if it showed up on a search
engine results page. Do yours?
Optimizing URLs
What goes for the page title often goes equally for the page’s URL.
Although there is a debate about what impact dynamic URLs have on search
engine results, the fact is that most web stores can control their
URLs, and product and category pages that have simple static URLs are
easier to optimize.
As with page titles, use of your critical keywords in the URL can
have benefits. In fact, you can make a good case for using your page
titles as, essentially, your URLs. For example, if your category page
title is “Brass Birdhouses” because you’re targeting that keyword, you
can make a case for the URL being www.thebirdhousestore.com/brass-birdhouses.html.
But don’t just go changing all your URLs on a whim. Unless you are
developing a brand new website, those pages are likely already indexed
by Google, Bing, and other search engines, and just changing the URL
will be disastrous for your existing search engine rank on those pages
(searchers clicking on search results will get “Error 404″ page not
found errors).
You can change your URLs, but for every change you’re going to have
to create a 301 redirect. Almost all web store builders have an easy
built-in menu for doing this. This is a time-consuming process, but
vital.
Furthermore, consider the fact that the value that a well-written URL
brings is actually rather marginal, overall. If a page is ranking
poorly and you’re trying to make it better, then this is a trick worth
trying. But if a page already ranks well with the existing URL, it might
be best to just leave it alone.
Optimizing Meta Data
Next comes the page meta data. From an SEO standpoint, the “easy fix” meta tag to be concerned about is the “description” tag.
In the next column on your spreadsheet, paste your existing
description meta tags for each page on your website that you’re
targeting.
You might be surprised to discover that pages that are critical to
your SEO strategy are actually missing this meta tag completely. It’s
easy to overlook adding that bit of meta data when you’re building out a
site.
There isn’t a “trick” to writing good description tags that isn’t
part of writing good page titles. Look at the descriptions as they are
today. Do they use the keywords that you’re targeting for that page? Are
those keywords used early in the description itself? Are the page
descriptions actually descriptive of the content of the pages to which
they are attached?
As with page titles, there are limits to what the search engines will
display in terms of the search results snippets. Hold the complete meta
description to no more than 156 characters, ideally, and get those
keywords featured early in the description, as this can enhance
click-through rate as well.
Lastly, just as page titles should be unique, so should page
descriptions. Don’t use the same page descriptions for more than one
page on the site. That should actually follow naturally from your
overall strategy, as the keywords you’re targeting should also be
different for different pages.
Optimizing Page Content
What goes for the other elements in your on-page SEO strategy, go equally for the actual page content on your site.
This likely will not end up as a column on your spreadsheet, but look
at the pages that you’re targeting and ask yourself the same old
question: Do your targeted keywords for each page actually show up on
the pages themselves?
There are useful easy-to-implement strategies for calling a search
engine’s attention to particular keywords on a given landing page.
Simply using a keyword more than once is a strategy, though you should
avoid “keyword stuffing” — the practice of using a particular keyword
too much or in awkward ways that are clearly designed to “trick” a
search engine but provide no user value.
Another strategy is to use the keyword on the page within the context
of your H1 (header) tags, in essence, noting to the search engine that
the keyword is in the page headline. As with page titles, use the
keyword early in the headline, and don’t use more than one set of H1
tags on the page (that’s what H2 through H6 are for).
Beyond that, keep in mind that retail websites often suffer from the
problem that category pages and product pages are image-heavy and
text-light. This is good for the user, actually, but the search engines
can’t do anything with a picture directly. The best that they can do is
to rely on the images ALT tag, which should go with every picture.
Because you want your use of keywords to be proportional to the rest
of the text on the page, this probably means that you’re going to want
to do some writing. Try to craft at least 50 to 100 words worth of good,
descriptive written content on every page of your site, including
category pages. By doing this, you’re adding enough content overall that
the keyword usage will be statistically proportional.
As an aside, but an important one, it’s tempting to rely on
manufacturer’s product copy when considering what to put on a product
page. From an SEO
standpoint, however, this is almost always a mistake as that same copy
will be used often across the web, leading Google and other search
engines to regard your store as offering nothing particularly novel to
the user in terms of content.
Beyond that, another strategy is to add some highlighting — such as
bold or italics — to keywords. Don’t expect this to have much of a
dramatic impact, but every little bit helps.
