Ecommerce Traffic–SEO for Ecommerce

Ecommerce traffic – How do you build and increase the directed flow of potential customers to your online, retail store? How you drive traffic and do SEO for ecommerce is essentially the same for an Internet business selling physical products as it is for any other website. Although the mathematics and engineering of search engine optimization (SEO) can be very complicated, in this post I’m going to discuss some of the basic points of traffic development and Ecommerce SEO. It isn’t necessary to deal in depth with the algorithms that govern search engine behavior unless you are a programmer, and that isn’t my purpose here. The basics are within the grasp of just about anyone willing to take the time to learn and apply. I’m assuming that most of you reading this are probably do-it-yourselfers and probably don’t have the resources to outsource this or hire a professional SEO firm.

Although SEO and ecommerce traffic development go hand in hand, they are not necessarily the same thing. Some traffic building techniques enhance SEO and some SEO techniques enhance traffic development. For example, if you put an ad in your daily newspaper, that drives traffic but will not necessarily influence SEO. Similarly, your choice of meta description content may influence search engine placement but may not directly push visitors to your site. In my opinion, the point of SEO for ecommerce is to promote the best possible positioning of your site in the various search engines. For our purposes, the reason we want to do that is to make our site as visible as possible to our target audience–potential buyers looking for what we have to sell. At a basic level, SEO generally concerns on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

Ecommerce Off-Site or Off-Page Optimization

I’m starting here because the basic concept is fairly straight forward. Off-page factors generally refer to the number and quality of links back to your main site. Backlinks are important because they bring traffic and they can also be significant in determining your own site’s Google rank and page rank for your keywords. the anchor text used in backlinks influences the page rank of your site the keywords used to find it. Anchor text comprises the specific words used in the link back to your site. Lots of high quality backlinks with keyword rich anchor text relevant to your site’s pages will tend to push those pages higher in search engine rankings.

Quality of link usually refers to the Google and/or Alexis rank of the site. The higher the rank the higher the quality. Links from .edu, .org, and .net sites are generally considered to be of the highest value. Links from .info sites with zero rank are considered the lowest value. Generally, any backlink is better than no backlinks, though you want to avoid backlinks from spam, hacker, gambling and pornography sites.

Although strategies of backlinking can be involved and complicated, do not get lost in the complexities. Keep in mind that the basic concept is simple and simply involves getting links back to your site. Sometimes those links will be direct, one-way links and in other cases those links will come indirectly via other sites. That is, sites A, B, and C link to site D, and site D links to your main site. Link building strategies are generally permuations of ways of building link networks and targetting those links at your site and depending on time, ingenuity and imagination can be quite complicated. However, at its basic level, if you do nothing else but steadily build one-way links back to your site, you will improve your site’s ranking and traffic standings. It isn’t necessary to employ clever and intricate linking strategies for their own sake as simple links back to a site are effective.

Common ways of generating backlinks include:

• Authority Site Back Links
• Submission of site to search engine directories
• Blog commenting (comments provide backlink to your site)
• Article Writing and publishing to article directoriesSocial
• Bookmarking submission
• Social News sites such as Delicious, Propeller, Reddit
• Press release submission
• RSS Feed submission
• Video Submission
• Blog creation from free hosted blogs such as blogger.cowordpress.com, Tumblr, Livejournal, Blog.com
• Free Social publishing platforms such as Squidoo and Hubpages
• creation of mini networks
• Linkwheels (one kind of mini link network)
• Backlinks from Profile pages
• Purchase of expired domains having page rank
• Forum account creation from high page rank forum sites
• Google Documents
• Software submisson via PAD files to software download sites
  Classified ad sites
• Software link building tools such as those from Incansoft.com and Seolinkrobot.com.
• Use of article submission and link building services such as Unique Article Wizard, LinkJuicer, SEO Juice, SE Nuke, Peter Drew’s EVO II, linkvana, and 3-Way Links.
• SEO outsourcing such as Lexorsoft.com (a fairly well-known outsourcing business operating out of the Philippines)
• Kurt Melvin’s Dombom.com forum is a superb “underground” SEO resource. Here, you can learn a huge amount about SEO, link building, and traffic generation strategies from a true SEO explorer who has been around from the beginning.
• Seobook.com is also a valuable and highly recommended SEO resource.

Now, I am not recommending or saying that you should use these services. There are many more such services that I’m sure I have never heard of that are reputable, and you will need to do your own research if you are interested. I am merely pointing out that these are a few examples of well-known businesses that provide these sorts of services.

It is important to implement a systematic plan for developing backlinks. There are many ways of using and mixing and matching these techniques, and though it is generally considered important to use as many backlinking strategies as possible, it is perhaps more important to be methodical and systematic in your approach and plan for the long term development of links. If you are doing the work yourself, you will need to make and keep a realistic schedule for link development. Note that all of the above techniques can bring traffic to your site–which is part of the point–as well as influence page rank, which will also bring more traffic to your site. Also note that scale of implementation is crucial. You want to create as many links as is practical over the course of the lifetime of your site. SEO for ecommerce is not merely about page rank but also site promotion. As with any business, offline or online, you never stop promotion.

On-Page or On-Site Optimization

On-page optimization really concerns the text and content on the various pages of the site as well as the various meta features of the site.

For the most part, we wil be concerned with content, which includes:

• headlines
• titles
• menu headings
• category listings
• product descriptions
• articles
• product reviews
• anchor text
• customer testemonials and comments
• any other words and phrases visible to your visitors

Generally, you want the keywords and search terms used to find your site to appear in your headlines, titles, menu names, and category listings. Much of on-page optimization concerns the choice of keywords and their placement and frequency of occurence on your site.

A very important but often overlooked SEO opportunity is what you call your domain name and the file names of your pages as they appear in the URL of your domain name.

Text refers to the specific key words and phrases chosen and used everywhere in your content (not just articles and product descriptons). SEO ecommerce involves the deliberate choice and use of words in your content to let the search engines and your visitors know exactly what your site is about. The choice of the best words to use, how and where to place them on a site page as well as where and how often they appear in your articles, posts, and product descriptions is a subject of much discussion and controversy.

Ecommerce SEO Internal Linking

One other important ecommerce SEO strategy is your site’s internal linking structure and the use of contextual links. Internal linking structure means how your site’s pages link to each other. Ideally, your site will have an efficient system of linking that allows the search engines and humans to easily navigate your site. Linking structure is huge subject and not directly related to traffic, so I won’t dwell on it other than to advise you to be sure your site has a site map easily found by the search engines. Contextual links are links found in the body of your articles, posts, and product discriptions that refer to other pages on your site. As a general rule (apply with common sense), you want your pages to have at least one contextual link leading to some other content page on your site. To some degree, how you link guides the search engines around your site. This, in turn, influences the importance the search engines give to pages, and that plays a part in page rank. For example, if you have 500 internal page links pointing back to one other page on your site, the search engines will attribute more importance to that single, target page.

Ecommerce Meta Content for SEO

By meta features, I mean the text and coding of your site that is visible to search engines but not to human visitors that nevertheless influences how the search engines respond to your site pages. If you bring up your a website page and click on “View Source,” the source coding will appear in a text editor. Most of the meta content is found in the header at the top of the document. There you can see the meta keywords, meta description, and other meta tags. Meta tags refer to the information enclosed in these brackets: < . . . >.  For example,  <h1>title</h1>.   You can see other examples when you click on “View Source” in the “View” menu at the top of the browser window. Another tag that can be helpful is the image Alt tag. This tag allows you to include a brief, keyword rich description of an image displaying on your page. For an example of this, go to Yahoo.com and put position the mouse curser over the main news image. You will notice that a small rectangle with a text description pops up. That text appears through the use of the image Alt tag. This is very easy to do, and the point is to provide more keyword relevant text to help the search engines more accurately understand your site.

The use and value of meta tags is again a subject of controversy, but as a rule of thumb, your title tag, meta keyword tag, meta description tag, and h1, h2, and h3 tags are the most important in providing search engines with information useful in determining page rank. In terms of ecommerce seo and traffic, it is important that your product pages have carefully thought out, unique content for these meta tags. I’m not going to say very much more about meta features in this post because I think that in terms of the priorities and the scope of this post, visible content is generally much more important for both SEO and increasing website traffic.

Site Structure

Your site should have a clean, simple, and logical structure. As mentioned above, this will not only make it easy for your site visitors to move around, but it will also facilitate search engine discovery of your pages. One way to approach this is through menu headings, which should be named with relevant keywords. All information found under a menu heading should pertain to that subject. You can always have sub menus with their own organization, and you can always link internally from one menu subject area to another. Also as mentioned above, you site should have a sitemap, and you can even publish the sitemap as an RSS feed to give it more search engine contact. The sitemap will makes it much easier for the search engines to spider and index your site. For the purposes of ecommerce SEO, you generally want all of your product pages within as few clicks as possible from your home page. Ideally, all product pages will be within 2 or 3 clicks from the main page. This is logical as you want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to get from the home page to a product page in order to buy something.

Ecommerce SEO Page Content

As an ecommerce merchant, your site may essentially be a shopping cart. Some of the most successful ecommerce sites are just that, highly efficient shopping carts displaying products, product descriptions, and customer reviews in as efficient and simple manner as possible. As much as possible, the your page content should follow these simple guidelines:

• be natural and easy to read for a human reader
• original (and therefore unique)
• include keyword or keywords for your product (or subject)
• additional contextual verbiage on the page should include words and phrases that are highly relevant to the product or specific subject of the page

SEO Content Rule of Thumb

The points listed above are deceptively simple. Don’t let that fool you. They are vital to the search engine “quality” of your content. A rule of thumb in current practice is that your main keyword(s) should comprise 2% to 3% of the word count on the page. It is not necessary to stuff keywords into the page content. Writing should be natural and written for humans. The surrounding lexical (meaning words and phrases) items should be relevant to your subject. Typically, your product or article title should include your keywords or phrasing very close to your keyword. If possible and if it is natural to do so, include the keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph. Sparingly sprinkle the keyword or phrase throughout your description or article. In the last paragraph, also try to include your keyword. It isn’t necessary to include it in every paragrapsh, though it is important your description/article be lexically efficient in the sense that the supporting words and phrases should be highly relevant to your subject. As an example, look over this article and notice how I’ve included the terms “ecommerce seo,” “seo for ecommerce,” and “ecommerce traffic” into the post. Jucicious use of underlining, italics, and bold face type can also enhance the SEO value of your page. You don’t want to go overboard, but make use of these where it makes good sylistic sense for emphasis.

Some of the and most successful shopping cart sites take full advantage of the opportunity to place content on the page. Examples of ecommerce content include the following:

• product descriptions
• product news
• product reviews
• customer reviews
• customer testemonials
• contests
• promotions and specials
• RSS feeds
• customer profile pages

Two sites that take full advantage of customer reviews are Amazon.com and Newegg.com. You will notice that Amazon has thought of other ways for customers to contribute content such as through the use of wish lists. Notice that the content is keyword rich. Now, this does not mean that you stuff your writing with keywords. This means that product reviews and articles place the main keywords, if possible, in the title, the first sentence, and then several times more if the content piece runs about 500 words. The remaining text should be relevant to the product. With product descriptions, it may not be possible or necessary to write 500 words–this is more likely to be the case with product reviews or customer responses. Your product description may only require 2 or 3 hundred words, in which case you place the main keyword in the title and perhaps once more in the text, and the surrounding descriptive text must be highly relevant to the item. If it is consistent with your business and site model, think of ways to invite customers to create relevant content for you as with reviews and testemonials.

A Blog can Help

Having a blog can be very useful in this respect. If your shopping cart has minimal features and does not allow you the option of longer product descriptions and cannot accomodate customer created content, then host a separate blog. The blog will not only allow you the potential of creating thousands of relevant, product oriented posts, but allow customer content creation through comments, reviews, and guest authoring. In this way, you can create many additional pages targeting your product keywords, and such a blog also has the potential creating a traffic funnel to your ecommerce product pages if the blog pages are well indexed.

One ecommerce example you may find interesting is Etsy.com. This site has managed to integrate shopping cart, community response, reviews, and blogging into one unified structure. I think it is highly successful, and it is bursting with content. This is brilliant from an SEO and traffic standpoint because the site has many hundreds, if not thousands of pages of keyword rich, relevant text indexed by the search engines and thousands of ways for the site to be discovered through random search queries made by potential customers.

Another example of good ecommerce SEO and site architecture is Groundsforchange.com, an ecommerce site selling high-end Fair Trade coffee. This site is much smaller and simpler than the other examples I’ve mentioned. However, notice how it uses content on the page. Also notice that it is highly efficient in ecommerce function. When you click through the site, notice how quickly you move and how easy it is to get to the product pages and access the check out function.

Ecommerce Traffic Development and Scale of Promotion

Good SEO will help promote your site and drive traffic. As mentioned above, SEO and traffic go hand in hand. Building backlinks and constructing link networks that focus link attention on your main site will bring traffic. Kurt Melvin and Ely at Bluehatseo.com discuss link building strategies in detail. In order for link development alone to bring 500 to 1000 visitors a day, it must done on a massive scale. In my opinion, scale is one of the most important factors determining success or failure. However, it is also possible to drive traffic by focussing on traffic development alone. Generally traffic techniques + SEO = huge traffic, when this is done on a large scale.

There are zillions of traffic techniques. Zillions may be an exaggeration, but there are many. However, to implement even a single traffic technique on a large scale can take time and effort. If you are serious about your business, then it is time well spent, but you will need to decide which techniques are not only practical for you but consistent with your business model.

Examples of offline traffic techniques include:

• join your local Chamber of Commerce
• advertising in local newspapers, classifieds, advertiser sheets
• radio advertising and sponsoring public radio spots
• sponsor worthy causes in your area
• local fairs, state fairs, flea markets
• leaving business cards with your site URL in public places where people can “accidentally” find them
• t-shirts
• putting a magnetic sign on your car
• flyers on public bulletin boards
• press release to local newspaper
• write a column for local paper or local advertiser sheets

SEO techniques | Traffic Generation

• RSS feed submission to 20 or more RSS feed aggregators
• social bookmarking site pages on Mr. Wong, Digolet, Mixx, folkd, linkagogo, bibsonomy
• listing site pages on social news sites such as Propeller, Delicious, Digg, and Reddit

These three techniques are especially helpful when used to support other techniques. For example, when you publish a blog page or add a new page to your site, be sure to:

• give post its own RSS feed or make sure that it is included in site feed
• social bookmark post
• submit to social news sites

Additional, standard sorts of traffic generation methods include:

• Submit frequent press releases using free, online press release sites.
• Make and submit podcasts in your subject area to podcast sites. (Podcasts are audio reports that you make and upload to either your own site or a third party server. You then submit what is essentially an RSS feed of the podcast to podcast sites.)
• Publish as many blogger.com and wordpress.com blogs linking back to your main site and apply the three techniques above to each blog post.
• Set up a separate Squidoo lens and Hubpage for each topic area of your site.
• Set up accounts on other social publishing platforms, such Tumblr and Blog.com and publish article linking back to your site. Apply the three techniques above to each post.
• Write guest posts on blogs related to your site subject. Apply the three techniques.
• Comment on blogs related to your site. Ping the comment.
• Submit videos to video sites. Apply three techniques above. Videos can also produce dramatic results
• Mass submit articles to article directories. You will need to buy an article submitter or use a submission service such as Unique Article Wizard. This can have immediate, profound effect if done on a large scale.
• Use paid services such linkjuicer or SEO Juice to do some of the work for you, or outsource the work to a company such as Lexorsoft.com.

Secret to Ecommerce Traffic

One of the key secrets to ecommerce traffic generation, or any website traffic development is the size and scope of scale of the promotion. Because we are largely concerned with ecommerce and selling of physical products, I suggest using some sort of advertising campaign that involves local advertising. With some thought, you can put together a coordinated promotional campaign for your local area. A rule of thumb in retail sales is to start locally to go globlally:

• Sponsor worthy causes in your local area, region and/or state.
• Join your local Chamber of Commerce.
• Use press releases, both online and if possible, offline through your available local news resources.
• If selling physical products, sell at local and state fairs, flea markets, artisan markets, and any other opportunity allowing a booth where you can sell your goods.
• When selling at flea markets, hand out promotional material such as flyers and business cards.
• When selling at flea markets, keep a signup book handy where people can leave their email address for newsletter mailings.

Facebook and Twitter

Two important Internet resources that work well both for local and national/international promotion include:

• press releases (already mentioned above)
• Facebook and Twitter

I won’t say more about press releases, other than that they deliver if used often and correctly. I think setting up a page or “store” on Facebook can be extremely effective for ecommerce. I would advise anyone starting out in ecommerce to factor Facebook or similar social sites into their business plan. This is a potential traffic goldmine if you take the time and thought to “mine” it effectively. Facebook has a great deal of social trust, and an ecommerce Facebook account will serve you nationally and internationally. Locally, it offers any potential buyer in your region a way to contact you in a safe and acceptible manner. You can also promote your Facebook account using SEO techniques to give you additional search engine visibility. By the way, once you open your Facebook ecommerce page, you could use the power of press releases to announce that fact. Don’t underestimate the potential leverage of Facebook.

Twitter isn’t for everyone and it isn’t for every business, but there is no doubt that a Twitter account can bring visitors to your site. Unfortunately, I’m not able to go into detail about how to set up a Twitter account in this post. There are many ways to use Twitter, and one that I want to bring to your attention is that Twitter works very well with blogs. If you choose to host a company blog, then you can set it up to automatically post an alert to your Twitter account so that all subscribers are alerted each time you post. Twitter announcements themselves often feature in search engine results and this, too, brings people to your site. I would encourage you to study Twitter to see if this would be a useful addition to your traffic strategy.

Yahoo! and Google

Especially important for ecommerce, submit your sites and products to the Yahoo! Directory to the Google Product Search. For more information, try ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/ and www.google.com/intl/en_us/products/submit.html. You can also submit your site to the Google Open Directory, also know as DMOZ at www.dmoz.org/add.html.

Article and Blog Posting

One traffic strategy that works like gangbusters is the mass submission of articles to directories and blogs. When I way “mass submission” I’m talking about a cumulative, sustained submission to thousands of blogs and article directories in your general subject area. Ideally, this means that you would submit at least one article a day to 1000+ publishing sources, such as article directories, ad sites, and blogs. This is helpful in creating vast numbers of backlinks to your pages as well as driving traffic to targeted site pages. In my opinion, article submission is only truly effective if done on this large scale. There is differing opinion on this, so I’m only telling what I think, and for me, this is very effective, but only if you plan on publishing at least once a day for a period of at least six months. You will see results much sooner and even with only a few articles, but in my opinion, it isn’t worth the effort unless you plan on doing as much as possible for at least six months. It is also important that your articles be of reasonable quality and contain at least one, true point that can be of use to a reader. Having said this, I know of one successful business person who publishes high quality articles in just a few directories but promotes the article with SEO in order to get traffic to his site via the articles. However, this person is not actually engaged in the sort of ecommerce we are discussing, and so I don’t know if this would work for an online retail store.

How does anyone publish hundreds of articles to thousands of directories? Although you can write the articles yourself, you will probably either need to outsource distribution, buy an article submitter, or subscribe to a service such as Unique Article Wizard (UAW) to make this doable. There are a number of services that promote the publication of short articles across a large networks of websites. I mention UAW because I use it myself; it will be up to you to do the research to find other, reliable publishing services. Content Crooner, Content Spooler, and Spin Distribute are three other article distribution services that have good reputation. Although I cannot personally vouche for them, they may provide a satisfactory article distribution solution for you. An alternative is to do it yourself but limit your publishing to 15 or 20 of the better article directories, plan on taking more time, and publish as much as you can feasibly do for 6 months to a year. Keep in mind that you will see results in much shorter time, but the sustained publishing effort will pay off in laying the foundation for long term results. If you are going to publish in only a limited number of directories, I would suggest Associated Content because it is generally very high quality, has high trust with Google, and it will pay you to publish. Publish with Ezine Articles because it also has good Google trust and can be successful in bringing traffic to your site.

Viral Strategies

In Internet marketing, the term “going viral” means that something spreads by word of mouth really fast. That is, something becomes so interesting so fast that almost instantaneously, you experience a huge spike in traffic. It is difficult to know what characteristic causes something to catches fire with the imagination of the public and spread like a virus, or like . . . wildfire, if you’ll pardon the mixing of puns and metaphors. However, examples of products that catch the buyer imagination would be the Apple iPad, iPhone, and Mp3 players. The Silly Bandz that have popular with kids is another product that took off virally. YouTube videos often viral when they start receiving a thousand hits in 24 hours. Examples of strategies intended to lend a viral quality to your site include:

Link Bait A snippet of text that arouses enough curiosity, interest, and/or mystery as to cause someone to click through on the link to your site.

Video A video either hosted on your site or published widely on video hosting sites that ignites enough interest that you experience a spike in traffic.

Contests Just what the word means. Sponsor a contest on your site to grab customer interest. You could sponsor a writing contest for your blog, best idea contest, best video contest, or even a random giveaway contest. Any sort of winaprize contest will stir viral interest in your site.

GiveAway Offer to give away something cool in exchange for signing up to your newsletter. As a contest, you would offer to do a random drawing for an Apple iPad or some other thing that is considered cool and desirable. Do this once a month or every week and your site will catch on.

Surveys and Polls People love to offer their opinions. This is not as catchy as contests and giveaways, but the idea is sound and will help hold people on your site.

Invite Comments Have a section of your site devoted to customer comments. The point of this is to keep customers on your site and to help create content for indexing the the search engines.

Build a Community Incorporate customer profile pages, product reviews, and other customer generated content in a community section of the site. You might consider offering a forum for registered customers.

However you choose to go about your ecommerce SEO and traffic strategies, be consistent in your approach. Take the time to determine which strategies are practical for you and in line with your site and business model, and then follow through for the long term. Never be haphazard with SEO and traffic development, but on the otherhand, don’t be afraid to test and experiment and make changes when necessary. Remember, search engine optimization breaks down into attention to link development and attention to the content on your site. Both SEO and traffic generation ultimately rely on the publication of as much content on as many different sources as possible. Virtually all of your published content, whether it is on your site or on any of the other vast number of resources will link back to some portion of your site.

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