In our last blog post, we helped simplify some key SEO terms to help you get your own website optimized.
Now, we want to help you take the first few very important steps to make sure your website is visible on search engines and is ranking where it should be.
This is a very simple process, but also very important. If you recall from the last article an XML Sitemap is your way to communicate with search engine crawlers about the pages you want them to crawl on your website, as well as indicate how often your site is updated. This is how you do it:
Since you’ve just created your shop you obviously have certain terms that make your brand unique.
To make sure this distinctiveness is reflected on search engines, there are a few online tools you can use to create keyword combinations, see trends, and get search volume.
We discussed the function of this file in our last piece, now we’ll teach you how to write one!
The last post explained the importance of HTML elements like alt tags, title tags and header tags.
A free SEO audit is a great way to ensure you implemented all of them correctly!
You want to make sure all links on your website point to http://yourwebsite.com and not your index page or your default page like http://yourwebsite.com/index.php.
If you do that, you’re splitting links, which isn’t part of a good link building strategy!
This is a fairly simple process that ensures that your website redirects are permanent (301) and not temporary (302 or 307).
Having the wrong redirect could potentially cause none of the links to your website to reflect on your SEO ranking because it is considered a temporary redirect.
To check for this follow these steps:
Simply jamming your website with keywords will not help your SEO rankings.
In fact, Google and other search engines may think it is spam and hit you with an SEO penalty! Moz recommends using your keyword a maximum of 15 words per page.
While this is not a hard and fast rule, you should more or less try and abide by it because search engines value natural language rather than content stuffed with keywords.
While you can’t necessarily control externally linked anchor text, you can control the anchor text you have with your internal links:
You want to make sure the URLs of your web pages are short and relevant to the content on the page.
For example, if you are writing a blog post about summer clothes you would want your URL to read https://yourwebsite.com/blog/summer-hats-2016 instead of https://yourwebsite.com/blog/bs3snx.html.
This not only improves your SEO, but it looks better and it makes it easier for people to find your content when they are searching for it.
If you recall what rich content was from our last blog post you will want to make sure you make use of it whenever appropriate on your webpages.
As more and more social media websites and websites with multimedia content become important, integrating them appropriately within your website can help immensely not only with your SEO but with your website’s structure and design.
There’s no particular rule that states the exact type of rich content you should use on your website, therefore you should make this decision based on what you feel would appeal the most to your users.
If you have a store where you feel visual content should be maximized, include small videos throughout your pages.
If social media is important to you, make sure you include several easy ways for people to share your pages, as well as integrating the several embed features offered by the biggest social media websites today.
As you can see, these steps are extremely simple to execute and require no development experience.
They can, however, make a big difference with respect to search results and can really help you get ahead in the very competitive E-Commerce Market.
We hope this article helps you on your journey to mastering SEO for eCommerce, once you have a website set up, Modalyst can help you find a number of unique products available for dropshipping or many eager retailers ready to dropship your products!