The ultimate success of your online store depends on several aspects. Perhaps the most important one will be where and how is your site indexed in the various search engines. Following are the SEO guidelines that your online store should focus on to obtain the best rankings possible. Implementing SEO techniques or hiring online marketing agency could give you maximum advantage over the competition.
8 SEO Tips For Your Online Store:
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1. Make Your Internal Links Point to the Same Domain
Here same domain refers to exactly what your site needs to be known as – http://www.mystore.com or http://mystore.com Search engines actually treat both the above URL’s as different sites. So if you allow the search engines to index both for your site it will dilute your page rankings. Although Google has an option to select whether to include the www or not still it’s better to avoid this.
2. Links Pointing To Your URL
All links to your main page should point to mystore.com and NOT mystore.com /index.php or mystore.com/index.html etc… for the same reasons as above.
3. Choose the Relevant Domain Name
This seems obvious yet many stores use domain names that absolutely have nothing to do with what they are selling. For e.g. if you are to sell jackets, register a domain that has “jackets” in the name. Avoid cute naming just for the sake of being clever as they don’t cut it for search engines. So, be clear and concise so that search engines can find you.
4. Pages Must Include Unique Titles and Meta Descriptions
Title tag and the Meta descriptions are the most important concept of SEO as well as for entire page. Choose titles that uniquely describe the page or product. Moreover, make sure you write the “description” Meta tag to accurately summarize the page.
5. Use Keywords in Product Urls
Search engines do not index dynamic pages very well. Avoid the following structure for your urls: http://mystore.com/item.jmc?id=154&subcatid=41 Instead have your URLs read like — http://mystore.com/jackets.html
6. Write Good Original Content for Your Products
Though this sounds obvious, yet many people go for short product descriptions or rely on a photo to describe their product. Keep in mind for search engines, a picture is not worth a thousand words. You have to pen down thousand words to make it that worth. Hence, make sure you design relevant “human” readable descriptions.
7. Use a Sitemap
Sitemaps do a pretty job of telling the search engines where all of your relevant pages are. This is quite essential. Most search engines such as Google provide way for you to submit your sitemap directly.
8. Get As Many Inlinks As You Can
A good way to get a lot of inlinks is to sign up for directories e.g. the yahoo directory, dmoz directory. There are other tools available to automatically submit your store to a bunch of different directories in order to increase website traffic for your Online Store. But doing just this for inbound link building is not enough as your have thick competition. You need professional assistance to boost your site’s visibility. Also explore the possibility of adding value to the community through your store to receive links to your website automatically.