SEO for your Online Store

As I have been telling you in some of my previous posts, just creating a wonderful good-looking online store will not be enough. There are many other ingredients that have to be added to this recipe in order to make it successful. One of them and the most important one is the quality of the products that you are selling and the other one is optimizing your blog for the search engines. This is nothing but SEO or Search Engine Optimization. If the latter is done effectively, then your web store will have a solid ranking in the search engines like Google. This also means that you will get a lot of traffic i.e. which in turn means a lot of sales.

Let's first talk about the importance of creating high-quality products. What would be the reason for you to repeatedly go to a shop near your house? It could be because of multiple reasons. It could be because the owner is a really nice friend of yours or it could be because he is the only one in your area who sells great products compared to the other sellers in the area.

Now, why am I telling you all this crap?

Because I am trying to make you understand how a business works in real life & I am trying to make you compare the two and consider similarities. You require essentially the same qualities to succeed online as well. If you regularly keep in touch with the people who buy from you and say something simple like "thanks for buying from my online store" by sending a personalized email, you can be sure that you have earned a customer. The same customer will buy from you next time he/she is looking for something that you are selling.

Now do you get the similarities between the two?

That's how it works in real life too. The only difference is that here you write convincingly and "there", you speak convincingly. I can't explain to you how much money I have made just because I wrote a simple e-mail saying "thanks".

Anyway, let's move on to today's subject. Just keep in mind what I said above as it will help you achieve long-term success.

Today's topic is SEO & I will tell you about why SEO is really important for your online store. By simply optimizing your blog for the right keywords, you will rank high in the search engines like Google and get a lot of traffic.

There are 2 parts in SEO:-

On-page optimization - This part involves the content that you put on the pages of your ecommerce store.                                                                        Click here to get SEO Elite

Identifying the right keyword phrases – This is the first step in On-Page Optimization. Basically how it works is that the more the number of terms Google finds on the web-pages of your website. Let's consider this page that you are viewing right now as an example. Let's say that I am trying to rank first on Google for the keyword "SEO for your Online Store", and then theoretically, if I repeat it over and over again in this page, I should rank very high in Google. But unfortunately, it is not as simple as that. It was like this before until spammers abused the system because of which Google changed its algorithm. So your best bet would be to get a good keyword research software like SEO Elite in order to recognize the best keywords that you can use to market your online store.

Monitoring the competition in your niche – You would also have to constantly monitor your competitor's and keep track of what they are doing in order to succeed in this business. Oh and by the way, a niche is simply the kind of business you are marketing for. If you are trying to sell watches, then you are in the "watches" niche.

Off-page optimization – This is even more important than the on-page optimization. Remember that I had told you about how Google had changed its algorithm in order to reduce "spam" in its results? Now, Google has started to put more emphasis and consistently ranks websites that are optimized better off-page.

Backlinks – These are extremely important for your website. Let's go back to the "watches" niche that I was talking about earlier. Let's say you get a link from a reputed website in this market like Rolex.com to your website. This would significantly boost your rankings because Google considers Rolex.com to be an authority website in this niche & since you have a backlink from them, your website is important too. Use SEO Elite to analyze which websites rank high in your niche and to see if you can get backlinks from them.

How does Google know which websites are authoritative?

It uses a technique called Pagerank to determine the authority of a website. Pageranks is a scale of 10 with '10' being the best and '0' the lowest. All new websites start with a '0'. If you get backlinks from high PR websites, then the PR of your website increases. Now, this system can be abused too and our favorite people, the spammers recognized that. So they got links from many reputed websites by putting links in the comment's section.

So Google changed its algorithm all over again. It introduced something called as "nofollow". How it works is that Google will not recognize "nofollow" links as valid backlinks. So if you are trying to spam by putting up hundreds of links in the comments section of a reputed website, then forget it. Most reputed websites make all their nofollow because they are aware of what spammer's are trying to do.

There are many things in SEO that is beyond the scope of this article. Most of them can be learned by experience as go on this journey of online marketing. But I can say this about SEO. When I started out, I had to use Microsoft Excel to make a list of potential keywords that I could use for my online store. I would then have to search for the keyword in Google to do some research on the competition that I had & try and copy their backlinking strategy.

But now you don't have to do all that.

Most things that had to be done manually before can now be done with the help of some software. SEO Elite can do this and much more for you with just a couple of clicks. If you have checked out the screenshots that I have posted above, then you will know that it is an extremely powerful software that can achieve wonders for your online business since it reduces the workload so significantly. It has saved me a lot of time & you should consider this as an important one-time investment for the overall success of your web store. Besides, if you don't like it, you can return it because they offer a 100% money back guarantee for it. It beats most other keyword research software that it competes with.

Check out the screenshots to get a feel of what SEO elite can do for you.

Summarizing, I would say that if you are serious about making your newly started online store successful, then you should seriously consider implementing SEO for the WebPages of your store. This is something that most online marketers miss out on. They think that if they put up attractive images with very good quality products, then visitors will "automatically" come. But trust me; they will not "automatically" come. You would be a fool to think so. Before starting your ecommerce business, you have to use SEO Elite to analyze the market that you are planning to enter and then market well for that product specifically. That constitutes on-page optimization.

Then you have to use SEO Elite again for effective off-page optimization as well. Building a lot of backlinks & getting a good pagerank will help you a lot in this regard. Check out some of my other posts on what to sell online and tips for building a successful e-business

Good luck and be sure to let me know if you have any questions or comments in the comments box,

Chris.