E-commerce Marketing Basics

What to do (and NOT do) to enhance your position in
search engines.

Marketing your e-commerce site will be your most important job after your e-commerce site is published. When marketing through search engine optimization you must first understand that search engines are design bigots. They care nothing for images, graphic design or color. They care only for words and not all words are equal. Where the words are located, the relative type size of the words and the frequency of the words are the search engine’s primary considerations. Search engines use these words to build an index of the information on your site. If you have no words (as defined by search engines) on your web page, search engines will have nothing to index. Copy that is part of a graphic does not count.

Opening Page (Home Page) – Most search engines give the default (Home page, index page) page of your e-commerce site the highest priority. They assume that the opening page of your web site contains your most important information.

Flash: Most search engines cannot read the “words” on your Flash page. To the search engine a Flash page is basically an empty page. If you have a Flash site you must incorporate some sort of cloaking (the process of giving search engines a different page than you show the average surfer) to provide the “words” necessary for the search engine to have something to index.

Meta Tags: Most search engines do NOT read META tags (META KEYWORD & META DESCRIPTION). In fact, most of the search engines that do look at META tags don’t give them much relevance. If these are the only “words” on your e-commerce web page many search engines will have little to index.

Navigation:

• Most search engines do not “read” the information within <script> tags (like JavaScript). If your web site navigation is completely in JavaScript the search engine cannot read your links to other pages on the site. 
• If you are using JavaScript navigation you must provide an alternate set of text navigation links on every page to make sure the search engine can index your whole site. In fact, this is a good idea even if you are not using <script> tags. 
• Search engines prefer in-line (key word) links as opposed to image links. Most search engines give higher relevance to words contained in links on your web page. Use keyword links whenever possible. 
• Make sure that every page on your site has keyword links to every other important page of your site.

Information Pages: Information pages are just what the name implies. They are web pages that provide information to the user. More importantly, they can be used as key word gardens. If the keyword you are trying to register is “blanket”, build a page called blanket.htm, use HTML <H></H> tags with “blanket” as the first or second word; build the word “blanket” into the body copy several times; create keyword links on the page that contain the word “blanket” and create keyword links on other pages in your site that point to this page using the word “blanket”. If you use images, make sure the .alt tags include the keyword.

Your new page does two things… It gives the site user information that they may be looking for and it gives search engine spiders all they need to index your page.

Absolutely Don’t:

• Mask links – Do not create links that are the same color (or almost the same color) as the background color.
• Repeat keywords over 4 or 5 times in the body copy (depends upon search engine).
• Use JavaScript or Image maps as the ONLY navigation for your site.
• Use an automatic HTTP Redirect on the home page with less than a five second delay.
• Use “Click Here” or “Go Here” as link text. Use your keywords in links whenever possible.

Absolutely Do:

• Include descriptive, keyword titles on every page (keep under 100 characters with most important keywords close to the beginning)
• Include descriptive key words in your site headlines, body copy and links. As a general rule, however, do NOT repeat the keywords more than 4 or 5 times on a page.
• Links on other sites that use your key words will generally increase your position in most search engines for that key word.
• Include META description and keyword tags for those search engines that use them.
• Use your most important keywords in text links to other pages.
• Use as many keyword links as possible.
• Use <h></h> (headline) tags with keywords.

While these simple guidelines will not get you into the top position for most key words or phrases, they will insure that your site is AT LEAST available for the search engines to index. 

One last bit of advice. We have generally found that a “paid” registration does not give you any better placement. Your best bet for being indexed by the search engines is to be in the major directories. Search engines are just programs that follow links from page to page and site to site looking for words to index. If you are in the major directories (Yahoo [$295.00 per year registration fee], Open Directory Project [No registration fee] and LookSmart [basically $15.00 per month]) search engine spiders will find and index your site. If your budget is short, use the open directory project. Choose your category in the open directory project carefully because a real, live person reviews every site.

And one last DON'T. DON'T EVER sign up for any service that promises to register your web site with search engines and directories. They will do you no good and could well do you harm with the major search engines. And DON'T believe any company that GUARANTEES top position in the major search engines. If you are tempted, please read the guarantee carefully and you will see what we mean.

This information is provided by Web Transitions, Inc.
©2004 Web Transitions, Inc.