Think Google
Written by Chris Barling
Monday, 17 October 2011 00:00
When you provide a lot of information on your products, this also has major search engine benefits. Search engines love content and if the content is constantly evolving, they will rank you even better. People do see optimising their site for search engines as a bit of a black art, and they are partly right.
SEO is covered elsewhere in more detail, but some of the simple basics are well worth saying more than once. When people search, they type a “keyword” or “key phrase”(collectively referred to as “keywords) into the search box. Identifying the most popular keywords for your product range is the most important step. You can find this out by taking a free trial with Wordtracker www.wordtracker.com. You can also identify keywords that are well-used, but have fewer than average relevant pages on the web. These are your best opportunities – they represent niches where there are plenty of potential customers, but not too much competition. As a simple example that illustrates the benefit of careful keyword analysis, there are numerous pages on Google listing content and adverts for “Flowers”, but only three ads for “Bunch of roses”. Tools such as Google Search Analyzer (part of Adwords) can help identify unique search terms. Even if you’re not planning to use a pay-per-click (PPC) scheme it’s worth signing up as it will save a lot of time. Once you know your keywords, you should make sure these appear regularly on your site. The keywords should appear in text, product names, page names and titles, and even image names.