The Original Shopping Cart Search Engine Optimization FAQ
Version 1.01: A Living Document
with a last Revision Date of 7/1/04 by Mike Randolph, Shopping Cart Guru.
The Following is an overview of the steps that AbleCommerce
is using for its own SEO efforts. AbleCommerce.com is currently ranked
23rd for ecommerce software and 3rd for ecommerce
software hosting, even though the website is ‘biased’ towards the more
competitive keyword set ‘shopping cart software’ not ‘ecommerce software’.
With this in mind begin to work on your keyword sets, each having 2 or
more keywords. We’re working on about 50 keyword sets and have about ½ of
them in the top 3 pages at google.com after just a few months.
1. Identify important keyword sets:
a. Check your website log traffic reports. Analyzing
your website traffic reports using a quality tool such as Urchin, Webtrends and
the popular Webalizer is critical to the success
of your search engine optimization efforts. Log files contain valuable
information on the source of sites referring traffic to your website including,
sites with pages linking to your site and common search terms used by your
customers to find your site. Unfortunately if you’re just starting to
work on search engine optimizing your eCommerce store you’re not going
too find much useful information in your log files.
b. Do searches in Google.com (Install
the Google toolbar if you haven’t already!) for keyword sets your customers
might be using and notice which ones your competitors deem important. Researching
what your search engine ‘competitors’ are doing right and wrong is critical:
This is a race in which the winners on the first page take away nearly
70% of the prize money, which in our case are clicks resulting in traffic
to your website. It’s important to realize that anything less than a top
30 placement (first 2 or 3 pages) and you’re lost in the crowd.
c. Again the goal is to create at least
30 different “sets” of keywords. Remember customers don’t usually enter
a single search term: Create keyword sets, each having 2 or more keywords.
d. Use a tool such as WordTracker.com
which will give you helpful information about the keywords you have chosen
and suggest many other possibly combinations. A few things that you can
determine from Wordtracker:
i. Is
it a poor, good, or excellent keyword set that’s frequently used?
ii. The
number of competing Web Pages for your search terms.
iii. The
predicted daily traffic for each keyword set for a page 1 or first 10 ranking.
iv. The
number of times a particular keyword set has been typed in 2 months.
v. Determine
the PKI index for a keyword set to establish which keywords could result
in the most ‘easily obtainable’ traffic. SEO Hint $4 It’s often
less time consuming to generate equal traffic from 5 less competitive keyword
sets than it is to fight over the ‘one’ most frequently used keyword set.
e. Using a commercial tool such as WebPosition gold (Recently acquired by Webtrends)
or any of the freely available tools such gorank.com you can establish
the Keyword Density of your competitions WebPages. This is a quick
and reliable way to establish the common keywords.
SEO Hint $5:
Following the herd will often leave the better grass un-explored!
f. Research
your customers buying cycle to identify your keyword sets. For example
pretend your thinking of purchasing a fishing boat, you’ll want a new fishing
pole and fish finder. Selling fish finders? Even if you don’t sell fishing
boats or poles you’d still do well incorporating information on the poles
and boats your customers like the best and how there best used with your
products.
g. Narrow down your list of keywords
sets to the most important ones. You’ll normally establish a few
keyword bases and variations on those to create your keyword sets. For
example ‘eCommerce’ is the base which leads to ‘eCommerce software’, ‘eCommerce
solutions’ and ‘eCommerce software hosting’.
h. Carefully and finally you are able
to establish an initial store theme or keyword base to promote. For example
our AbleCommerce.com website’s primary theme’s (base keywords) are ‘shopping
cart’ and ‘ecommerce’ and ‘hosting’. Sub-themes include variations of
the base keyword along with commonly used variations such as: ‘Shopping
Cart Hosting’, ‘eCommerce Hosting’ and other variations
which accurately represent the AbleCommerce shopping cart feature set and
available services.
i. DO
NOT spam or do ‘tricky’ things. Consider that google.com consistently
provides accurate search results for over 4 billion web pages (4,285,199,774
as of July 1, 2004). If you work to create honest helpful
content you’ll do well. If you try ‘tricky’ things and work against the
heavily funded brilliant folks doing their absolute best to provide reliable
search results for the entire planet…you will NOT achieve consistent results
from your optimization efforts!
j. Submit
your site to the important search engines manually while focusing your
research and optimization efforts on the top three search engines: Google.com
(40%), Yahoo.com (30%), MSN.com (30%), AOL (15%) and Ask Jeeves (8%)
*.
* Search engine usage according to notable Neilson//NetRatings research firm, well known for it’s television
ratings services. Yes it adds up to more than 100% that’s because users
frequent multiple search engines but clearly it would seem google.com gets
many of the ‘first’ searches.
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