Ecommerce SEO–Don’t Forget this Vital Step
SEO for Ecommerce–Taking Your Store a Step Further
Although this site is really oriented toward product supply sources for small businesses–what I call micro businesses, such as the work-at-home single mom, retirees augmenting income, students working out of dorm rooms, I want to talk about SEO for ecommerce and building traffic to ecommerce sites. I’ll try not to repeat myself too much, but as I say in the article, it isn’t enough to just put your store on the Internet. Getting online is merely one step in the implementation of your business plan.
Quick Side Bar
Before getting started, I want to mention that one of the best ways you can start driving traffic to your ecommerce site is local advertising. This will also have SEO benefit because the search engines make note of the traffic to a site. But doing local, offline advertising can be a great way to become known locally and develop local reputation.
My point is that search engine optimization and planned traffic development must be factored in to your business plan. I talk about the basic aspects of ecommerce SEO in my article Ecommerce SEO and Ecommerce Traffic.
I’ll mention again that SEO generally falls into two categories, on-page and off-page SEO. On-page (or onsite) usually concerns optimizing the text, content, and organizational aspects of your site whereas off-page normally concerns acquisition of back links to your site and pages and linking strategies.
Although search engine optimization can be a really complicated, math heavy subject, it doesn’t have to be so for us because we are primarily concerned with the pragmatic side–the results and the legitimate practices that can raise our sites’ ranking in the search engines. What I’d like to do in this post is talk a little more about links and linking. At its most basic level, off-page SEO–and this is just as true for ecommerce as any other site–is simply links pointing back to your site and site’s internal pages. If you do nothing else but get tons of back links to your site, you will improve ranking and page position. I’m not saying that all links are equal because there is a hierarchy in the value of links. However, I have personally demonstrated as have many others that you can get valuable SEO mileage using a sort of “shotgun” approach to linking. It is a highly useful strategy especially when you need quick results.
Basic SEO Ecommerce Linking
The subject linking has justly received a huge amount of attention and continues to be the focus of intense interest. Some of the basic aspects of linking include:
- Link quality Not all links are of equal value in the eyes of the search engines.
- Link quantity The number of back links. Generally, the more back links the better.
- Link juice related to link quality, the factors that give links value and how to use your back links to give your site the most link impact in terms of benefit to ranking.
- Link acquisition The various means of getting back links.
- Linking strategies How you use, organize, and dispose links in order to get the most ranking impact.
- Link Velocity Essentially the rapidity with with links pointed at a site or page are created or deleted.
From our perspective as ecommerce merchants, the point of SEO, of course, is the increase buying traffic to our sites. That is why links are important to us.
Link Quality From search engine perspective, not all links have the same value. Value of links depends on a number of factors. One key factor is the value of the site from which the link originates. With Google, sites are valued on a page rank scale of 0 – 10. page rank (PR) 10 is the highest, and 0 the lowest. A second key factor is the domain from which the link originates. .gov and .edu sites are generally considered to be your platinum value domains. .net and .org are the gold/silver level of value, and .com of silver/tin. Domains such as .info are strictly tin unless they should have significant page rank, though that is rare in a .info domain. Thus, a pr 9 .gov/.edu site would out rank pr 9 .org/.net which would out rank pr 9 .com.
Even though just about all aspects of SEO are topics of argument, discussion, and controversy, basic SEO theory holds that sites and links can be valued in tiers. Kurt Melvin refers to these tiers as tin, silver, and gold. Eli of Bluehatseo.com also goes into detail about this. Basically, tier 1 links/sites are most valuable, tier 2 next in value, and tier 3 the least value. Examples of tier 3 links would be rss feed links, links from .info sites, links from pr 0 blogspot.com sites and most links from Squidoo, Hubpages, Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, other free publishing platforms, sites built on free hosting accounts, mass generated social bookmarks, autoblogs and other mass produced sites of minimal value. You can get a lot of mileage out of cheap links if you have enough of them.
Generally, basic SEO theory holds that you point the links from bottom level tier 3 sites to tier 2 sites (sites of better quality and content) but not your main money site, and point tier 2 links to your top level business site. Since we are talking about ecommerce, our main money site would be the site or sites where people show up and buy our products. This is the site or sites with which we want our name and brand to be associated. In this schema, bottom level links can point to tier 2 and tier 1 sites, and tier 2 links can point to other tier 2 and tier 1 sites but never to tier 3 sites, and tier 1 sites can point to other tier 1 sites but never to tier 2 and 3 sites. I am really only giving a clumsy paraphrase of Eli’s Upward Linking theory, and Kurt Melvin also talks about the power of focusing link impact. I’m not saying that you should run out and do this, but I want you to be familiar with the concept, because the idea of link juice is all about maximizing the page ranking power of your links. This concept of focusing link power by linking to links and how you link to links is all the rage right now, but I believe it was first articulated by Kurt Melvin and Eli; that is where I first encountered it some years ago, now.
When you read about creating links using blogger.com, wordpress.com,social bookmarking, Digg, rss feeds, article diretory submission and the like, you are really reading about one aspect of link building, and that is the development of tier 3 links. This can be incredibly powerful, but it is only one layer of the cake. Again, the grandmasters of this are Kurt Melvin and Eli, and if you want detailed technical explanations of mass link generation from two of the people who have played a huge role in defining SEO, see Kurt and Eli at the links provided above. And I’ll repeat that I’m not suggesting that you lose track of your major ecommerce goal by getting sucked into the world of SEO, but I think it is important for you to have some understanding of the dynamics of link building.
Link Quantity Generally, the more links the merrier. However, when you consider quantity, you also want to consider quality. Avoid links from questionable websites such a porn, warez, gambling, anything overtly illegal, sex trafficking and so sorth. A rule of thumb is that it requires fewer tier 1 links from authority sites to get a pr result than it does tier 2 and 3 links. It generally requires fewer tier 2 links to get a result than tier 3 links. In the paragraph above you saw how tier 3, 2 and 1 links can be harnessed to work together. (Keep in mind that the model given above is only al imited description of the possibilities). Another source of links is from the pages of your own site. If you have a 10,000 page ecommerce site, each of the individual internal pages carries link power that can be directed toward any other of your sites’ pages, or perhaps to some othe web property you own.
Link Juice This is a relatively new expression and refers to the power and relative value of a link or links. So, generally speaking a pr 9 link has more link juice than a pr 2 link. The various theories of creating networks of links that gradually and indirectly snake their way to your main site is all about maximizing link juice.
Link acquisition Common sources include blog commenting, rss feeds, social bookmarking sites, social news sites, social publishing sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages, free blogging sites such as blogspot.com and wordpress.com, profile page links, search engine directory submission, article directory submission, publishing of videos across video sites (such as YouTube), use of link development services such linkjuicer.com or seojuice.net. This is just a sampling of sources for tier 3 links.
Linking Strategies The granddaddy linking strategy is the one I discussed above. All other strategies are variations. Basically link strategies deal with creating mini networks or link wheels in order to direct link juice to your main site. I know this sounds a little vague. Largely, linking strategies involve ways of joining your tier 3 and 2 links together and then pointing links to your main site. If you only have tier 3 links, then you would be creating various networks of groups of tier 3 links and then shooting some of those links off to your main site. Please understand that there is no one, single fixed way of doing this. Having said that, if you want to learn more about linking strategies, look up Michael Campbell’s book, Revenge of the Mininet, which is now a free downoad. This was one of the first popular publications on link networks. Look up link wheels, and check out sites such as SE Nuke, seojuice.net, linkjuicer.com, and Unique Article Wizard. If you read the sales letters (not trying to sell these products), you can learn a lot about the kinds of link building strategies that these products automate. Check out the sites seomoz.com and seobook.com for more free information. For a very interesting read on SEO for ecommerce, check out Eli’s post SEO Checklist for Ecommerce Sites and From Affiliate to Ecommerce Mogul–The Real Secrets to Ecommerce. Sorry, not to push Eli, but I personally think this is great reading, and you won’t find this stuff anywhere else.
To wrap up, the point of all this is to get traffic to your site. And again, the simplest link strategy of all is just to get as many links and as great a variety of links as possible and shoot them to your site. This is crushingly effective and you can bypass all of the complexity surrounding building link networks. However, you can maximize your link juice by employing a bit of SEO strategy.
