Tuesday 28 August 2012

Time saving SEO for your online business

When running an online store, you can't afford to spend all of your time focussing on where your site is placed in the search engine rankings and how you can move your site up the rankings as there are other things which may take priority, such as enticing customers to your store and making sales.

However, while you can't spend all day keeping track of your search engine ranking, there are a number of things that you can look to do each day that will help you keep on top of it all. These are simple things that you can do first thing on a morning that will take you no time at all.

Google Analytics

Whether you are focussing purely on SEO or not, checking your website's analytics is a must for any online business. Not only does it give you an indication of how many people are visiting your ecommerce store, it allows you to see which specific pages they are visiting, how many pages each visitor goes on and where they originated from. All of this information is key in developing your marketing campaign and ensuring your website is as efficient and enticing as it possibly could be. In terms of SEO, this allows you to see which keywords are drawing people to your website, which backlinks are working and which are your most popular landing pages. If you find that certain keywords or backlinks aren't drawing any traffic to your website, you may need to look to alter or remove them altogether in order to replace them with ones which will result in more traffic. 

Check for duplicated content

If you produce a blog or various articles for your online business, having none duplicated content is extremely important when determining your search engine ranking. However, it isn't just you duplicating other people's content that could damage your ranking, but people duplicating your content on other websites. You should check on a regular basis whether there are any websites out there that are duplicating your content. There are a number of easy ways to do this. The easiest way to check this is to copy a chunk of text from an article and place it into a search engine. If the content brings up a search result that isn't your own website, it tells you that someone has duplicated your content. Another way to check on duplicated content is through websites such as "Copyscape." Copy in the address of your blog post into the address bar and then click "Go." The website will search the web to find any websites that have the same information as that included in your article. If you do find that there is a website that has duplicated your content, you should contact that website and demand that your content be removed from their site. If they refuse to remove the content you could request the the site be banned from search engine results. You could also bring legal proceedings against the site by giving them a cease and desist order which legally requires them to remove the content from their site or face further ramifications. 

Social bookmarking and forums

The more direct links you have to your website, the higher your online store is going to place in search engine rankings. When you create content such as articles, you should visit various social bookmarking sites and place links to your pages for users to access. Forums are also another great way for you to gain some easy links to your website. What this essentially involves is visiting forums related to what your business does and interacting with the community. This could be posting on a particular thread or creating your own thread to do with your business. If you comment on a thread, make sure you have a link to your website in your profile signature. This gives people who view your comment a way to access your business in order to find out more information about what it is your business does and what you offer. 

While sites like Facebook and Twitter are considered social engagement sites rather than bookmarking, you should also be placing links to various parts of your business. If you publish a blog, you should be placing article links for people to read. If you run an eBay store or other ecommerce business, you should post content advertising your products and offers on a regular basis along with links for users to access.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster tools allows you to check your website to see if there any crawling errors that have been flagged up on your site. Not only that you can see how fast your website is, any HTML improvements you can make on your site and how your click through rate is fairing on particular keywords. If you are constantly adding new content and new pages to your site you should look to check this everyday to see if any of these links have been flagged for errors. 



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