Just a bit about search engine optimization.

Search engine rankings are an essential factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then no-one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of links. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine listings.

I think it is fair to say that no SEO firm can absolutely promise you a number 1 position in Google, Yahoo! or Bing (the three major search engines). There are a number of different factors at play, one of which is the amount of competition for a particular ranking and the skill of the SEO going after the ranking. However, with persistence, it is not unrealistic to increase your page rank and also occupy a number 1 position for many of your search terms. Although search engines have some characteristics in common with a free market, I don’t think it is true to say that your site will just flow naturally into its “rightful” position. For that reason, if ranking is important to you, I advise at least paying attention to some basic tips to manage your sites positioning.

Site content is essential to good, on-page search engine optimization. A rule of thumb is that you want as much relevant content on your site as possible. As an ecommerce site owner, your site’s content will probably be driven and to some degree limited by the services and products you sell. If your site is a shopping cart with many products, I would suggest that you try to give each product a description of at least 2 to 3 hundred words (if possible). Try to place the keyword or phrase (or a close variation) that you expect buyers to use in their search queries in the product headline and description. Make the description with the placement of your keywords as natural as possible. Remember, you want your site and descriptions to be natural and pleasing to your human visitors. If you can’t do 300 words then do 200; if you can’t do a natural 200 words, than do 150. If you have a small site and are only selling a few products, consider integrating a blog into your site. This is a very easy and practical way to add hundreds, if not thousands of relevant pages to your site.

When determining an SEO strategy, it is important to be aware those search engines do not “see” graphic elements. In other words, devote your attention to optimizing all text elements and avoid the use of words and phrases in images if you want those words to be recognized by the search engines. Do not misunderstand this to mean that you should avoid images. Images and video are great, especially for an ecommerce site because you want to make your products as real as possible. One way to combine images with text is to take advantage of the Alt tag. The Alt tag is part of the coding of the site and allows you to add a text description (with your keywords) to the image. For an example of how this works, go to site such as eBay and put your mouse cursor over an image. A tiny text box will pop up with a brief description. That is the Alt tag at work. If you site uses many graphic elements and minimal text, use the Alt tag to add (not stuff) additional keyword relevant descriptive text.

The title of your page is very important, and making sure that you choose it wisely will make a big difference. Terms such ‘free article on safe children’s toys’, or ‘contact the children’s toy expert today’ are good to use as titles, for example they would get you a high ranking. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you put them all in. The navigation menu that appears on each page of your website should include your page’s title. Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases–the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too. Make sure that you don’t have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely related to your site your links are, the better your chances of being ranked in a higher position.

Arguably the most important element of ecommerce SEO and for long-term traffic are the back links pointing to your site and to the internal product pages. Text links back to your site from related websites where the link anchor text includes your keywords and phrases generally carry more search engine weight than the text elements of your on-page optimization. From the standpoint of the search engine only, you can have a site with miserable on-page optimization and practically zero content, but if you have a sufficient number of back links–even low quality back links–you can still arrive at a superior search engine ranking.

Although both on-page and off-page optimization are important, please take away from this an inkling of the power of back linking. The goal of your SEO strategy is to make your ecommerce site rank as high in the search engines for as many of your keywords as possible. The reason you want this is to allow as much natural, targeted traffic to your site as possible. By targeted traffic, I mean visitors who are already interested and looking for the products you sell. There are many sources of back links. Some of the most common include, article directory submission, site submission to search engine directories, RSS feed submission, social bookmarking, submitting pages to social news sites such Propeller or Digg, publishing on social blogging platforms such as Tumbler, creating profile links on forums and other sites allowing profiles pages. There are many such sources of links; how you link and how you use back link can greatly influence your site’s position in the search engines and amount of natural traffic it receives.

Learn how to use SEO for ecommerce and discover great tips on product sourcing for home business.