No matter what your website is about, your ultimate goal is to make it a popular destination for internet users. Your best bet: SEO. Trying to stay conscious of the keys of SEO while building an ecommerce site can prove to be a challenge. Informative, valuable content is certainly a must in the SEO world, but ecommerce sites typically have much less content than other sites. Also, since products on an ecommerce site are generally constantly changing, it can be difficult to get a good place in search results. Fear not, it IS possible to find SEO success with your ecommerce website. There are a few things you can do, starting with website basics, that will help your site ranking.
Keywords, keywords, keywords. Among SEO basics, your choice of keywords is a standard issue that has a huge effect on the ranking of any website. Before you get started, remember the importance of staying organized in the development of your website. You may want to create a spreadsheet that will allow you to keep track of all of the keywords that you choose. For your homepage, start with broad terms and phrases that you think your customer would enter into any search engine’s search bar. If you’re selling books on your website, the obvious choice would be things like “discount books,” “online bookstore,” or “buy books online.” As you look through your webpages, narrow your terms accordingly. Keywords like “fiction books,” “mystery novels,” and “autobiographies,” are obvious choices in narrowing down the genres of your selection. If you can prevent it, don’t use the same keywords on every page of your site, and don’t try to stick in as many keywords as you can on every page. Each page stands on its own when it comes to search engine ranking. Don’t underestimate the importance of the keywords you choose because you’ll be using them in these four places:
* Navigation/Links – As you set up your site navigation, you’ll want to use your keywords in the categories and page names you create. You’ll also want to put your keywords in your URL’s if you can, but do be conscious of the length of your phrases in both cases.
* Breadcrumb Trail – Breadcrumb trails help your site’s visitors see where they’ve been and generally look like this: home > fiction books > mystery novels. Googlebots follow these trails, as well.
* Alt Tags / Image Attributes – The keywords you place here are also indexed to major search engines.