A host of online merchants shut down their websites out of frustration every day because they simply can't attract traffic. And what is the point in spending a fortune putting up a site that doesn't make you any money? What this people fail to realize is that successful e-commerce is more than just offering quality goods or services at throw away prices.
Your goods and service offerings won't make you any money if the very people you're supposed to attract and sell to don't know about you. But how do they get to know about you and your wonderful product/service offerings? It's through search engines. Research shows that 70 out of 100 online buyers use search engines to find what they want.
This is a very important insight which means that for you to attract the 70 out of 100 online buyers, your site needs to be properly ranked by major search engines. Proper search engine ranking is largely a result of proper website optimization, below are some essential tips and tricks you can use to improve your search engine standing.
Try to get links from similar sites
Inbound links from sites similar to your own are important. This indicates that your site does have content related to that topic. It also indicates that your competition finds your site valuable, and that improves your sites credibility ranking.
The best sites to get links from are those with.edu and.gov extensions. Such sites are on top-level domains that have a large amount of credibility and are not easy to get. So if you can get the designers of those sites to link to you, that improves your credibility as well.
Generate sufficient content
Content is king. The more content you have on your site, the more there is to be indexed and appear in search engines.
Create content on one theme
The theme or topic of your entire site is important as well. If you have a lot of pages all around one basic theme, that will lend more credibility to each page that follows that same theme.
Keep your site active as long as possible
Please note that older pages in the same page will rank higher than newer ones.
A sitemap is a must
Site maps are search engine darlings - not necessarily for ranking, but for finding links on your site. It's not a must that you create an XML sitemap or Google sitemap, plain HTML sitemaps works just fine.
Employ 301 for permanent redirects
When you redirect your pages, you should always use a 301 http server redirect. This tells the search engines that the redirect is permanent and that they should change their index to use the new URL. Spammers use other types of redirects such as HTTP 302 & meta refresh which are not good to use.
Sammy Kirkland in web development and design. If you'd like to know more about our services, please visit our ecommerce design page and our wonderful cs-cart website design page.
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