With regard to search engine positioning, it is generally considered that the more incoming links you have, the better your chances of being in the top ten listings for your keywords. Good links are ones that are relevant to your own page and which link back to your site using text that makes that is obvious and relevant to your site. Google generally considers old links better than new links, and so the older a link, the more power it has to push you up in the search engines. In Google’s opinion, if a link withstands the test of time it is has to be relevant or else both parties would have removed the link after not seeing any positive action by Google.
One of the most popular, practical, and workable methods of not only getting search engine attention to your site but bringing potential customers is through the use of a blog. A blog is a publishing platform that allows you to make frequent, updated posts. When blogs first became popular, people used them as a sort of personal, online journal. Now a days businesses use them to publish company news, articles, thoughts, comments, tidbits and tips about the subject area, or just to stay in touch with readers. As a means of ecommerce SEO and traffic generation, blogs allow you a means of easily publishing hundreds and even thousands of pages of highly relevant, focused content. These pages serve as a sort of funnel through which you direct people to your product pages.
Try to select unique key words that have not occurred to your competitors. Optimize for your most profitable key words. How many sales does the key word generate? How much profit is made for each of these sales? Make sure that the key words are very relevant to your site so that people who find your site through your key words will not immediately leave. Try to assemble a list of key words that covers your site very will so that you are not leaving anyone or anything out. As an ecommerce merchant, your keywords will concern your products. In this case, you want to find out the words and phrases people use when they search for the products you are selling.
Content is a key factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles, menu names, headlines, and any category listings. It’s also worth doing a search for websites similar to yours and taking a look at the kind of content used on the pages. From a search engine point of view, more content you have the better. From a human perspective, the content should be well written, helpful, and interesting to someone wanting to know more about your products. It is generally a good idea to have between three hundred and five hundred words per page, Of course, your product pages may not require that much text, though product descriptions of 2 to3 hundred words would be optimum. Again, quality of content is more important than merely raw quantity. You cannot just put out three hundred words of meaningless jargon and expect visitors to find your site credible.
If you have a new start up, or even if you’ve been in business for a while, do a massive press release launch. You can outsource this and figure it into the cost of your budget for starting up, or you can do it yourself for free. Do local a local press release and/or press releases for you city and surrounding towns. See if you can get a sound bite on a local news show on radio and TV. Some of the social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter make it easy to announce yourself and start a little buzz about your business. Again, this can be hired out and calculated into the start up costs. Even after you start up, continue to do press releases. These not only bring traffic, but they remain in the search engines and sometimes gain good search position for your keywords.