Marketing Ecommerce Products with SEO/SEM – Link Building

If you are like me you enjoy being independent. Regardless of the reason, you probably came to this article to find out how to start the link building process for your ecommerce website. Whether you simply ran out of funds to have someone else do it or you would rather invest that money elsewhere, you came to the right place. While this next question may throw you off guard if you are not familiar with SEO at all, it does have a lot to do with link building.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is a short name given to a any link that is from another website that has a destination of your website. Therefore, if you own an ecommerce website called johndoesbikeshop.com and the webmaster from reallycoolbikestores.com linked to it on his website. That link would be considered a backlink.

What is link building?

Link building is any process that you take to obtain backlinks in effort to rank better within search engines. In a nutshell, anytime you are going out of your way to get a link from another website back to your own website (also referred to as backlinks) then you are link building. Therefore, there are many things you can do that could be considered link building.

How should link building be done for ecommerce?

Now that you know what backlinks and link building are we can move on to the more in depth stuff of the actual process. For an ecommerce store, it is imperative that the anchor text used in your backlinks is relative to the products or services you are offering. For example, many times people will get a backlink but the anchor text might be “click here”. Google does in fact count that as a vote to have your site rank when someone searches for “click here”. However, this does little to help considering you probably will not convert traffic that come to your site after searching for that term. Therefore, if you have any say in the process you should make the anchor text of all backlinks relative to your products or services. For example, if you are selling bikes, you want people who search for “buy bikes” or “bikes for sale” to find your website on the search engines. This, then, should be the anchor text used on your backlinks.

How do I start link building?

Link building is not a one time thing. You will never be able to say, “Okay, I am done with my link building for this website.” Instead, even if you are number one for a specific keyword, you will still have to do more link building because you know that there are other competitors trying to take your spot. Not only will they try, but if Google sees that there is more interest in their website than yours, you will quickly be replaced because Google will think that they are more relative than you are. It is safe to say this is a process that will never end during the time that you own an ecommerce store. You will constantly want to tell people about your site and gain links back to your store’s website.

The upside to this is that the methods of link building can be quite simple. Sometimes people will use services such as linkxl.com or text-link-ads.com but this has been spoken plainly by Google that they frown upon such services. Therefore, other methods can be taken that are also effective. Below is a short list of things you can do to help build backlinks for your ecommerce website.

1: Directory Submissions – Submit your website to directories online.

2: Article Marketing – Place content online at article directories with a link or two back to your ecommerce website.

3: Social Bookmarking – Link to content on your own site through sites like digg, delicious, and reddit.

4: Social Networking – Talk to others and link back to your website when you feel that your website is relative to the conversation.

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Basic SEO Guide for Ecommerce Websites

This is yet another topic that deserves a book to be written on it. The problem is that I can not recommend a book. In fact, this industry changes so quickly as Google tweaks their algorithm it is difficult to determine what the most important factors are. However, I will try to point out those that very few people will dispute as the big ones. Others are there just for your benefit to be aware of.

First off, there are two major categories in SEO. There is on-site SEO and off-site SEO. Generally, most everyone will start with the on-site SEO because you want Google to recognize what your website is about. If they do not, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword? These spiders that crawl your website will be looking at several different attributes on each page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google’s website.

Another note worth mentioning: What is a keyword? A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your website. I have been using a motorcycle website as an example throughout, so I’ll continue to do that. People could search for “motorcycle”, but they might also search for “buy motorcycle”, “black motorcycles”, “Harley Davidson motorcycle for sale”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases. However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note below that almost all on-site SEO has to do with is placing good quality keywords throughout your website where Google’s robots, spiders, or software might be able to determine what your website is about.

On-Site SEO Factors

1: The Title of the Page

2: The keywords used throughout the text on the website.

3: What keywords are used in H1 tags.

4: Keywords used in your domain name

5: Keywords used in the URL of a webpage.

6: Meta Keywords

Off-Site SEO

1: Links Pointing to Your Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a unique motorcycle, and you have it for sell, they may link to your website with “unique motorcycle” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

2: Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Harley Davidson’s official website or something along those lines.

3: The Age of Your Website

I listed this as an off-site related issue but really it doesn’t fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks. I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this than Google does.

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Marketing Your Ecommerce Website

To be quite honest, marketing your ecommerce website deserves much more detail than this single article. There are entire books devoted to some of the smaller aspects of marketing a website. So for this section, I am going to go over some of the common methods that you will find to bring people to your website. Some of them may intrigue you and I would encourage you to read more on those individual topics that you think might be good avenues to take for your ecommerce website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably one of the more popular and most discussed marketing methods. You may be telling yourself that this sounds way too complicated or technical. Really, it is not.

To explain what it is, I first have to explain a little bit about how search engines operate. We will use Google as our example because it is the most popular search engine in the United States. When you go to Google, type in a “keywords” to search on, it pulls up several results, sometimes millions. Now, Google does not have little workers that manually go through each website on the internet and determine keywords that are related to it. This would take countless hours and would be unproductive. Instead, they have what people call the “Google algorithm”. As Google finds new websites through its software, it determines what it is related to. It uses a wide variety of things to do this, the title of the page, the content, and who is linking to the website, what keywords people are using in their links when they do link to it, the domain name, etc. There is a huge list of factors that play a role in SEO. The act of marketing from your end, is to make your website easy for the Google software to determine what your website is about. Therefore, ranking you better than many other websites that Google is unable to tell what their website is about. The end goal is to have your website listed in the top few results when they are searching for your products or services.

Direct Advertising

This is one of the most popular marketing methods. It is simply like a billboard except on the internet. You place advertisements for your products or services on other peoples websites that might have traffic who would be interested in what you offer. For example, if you sell motorcycles, you might place a banner on a forum that has people who are interested in motorcycles on it.

Pay Per Click

This is one of the quickest methods to getting traffic to your website. The problem is that if you do not know what you are doing, you may never see a return on your investment. I highly recommend you read a lot about PPC before you ever get involved.

The actual process however is placing your website within search results at places like Google when people are searching on keywords. For example, you could pay $2.00 per visitor for when someone searches on “Motorcycle” at Google. This would actually not be a good keyword to buy because it is too broad. But again, this is a simple overview and you should read more into PPC if you decide to take this route.

Smaller Free Methods

Generally, these methods are not quite as good. At the same time they are worth mentioning because you will read about them elsewhere. These take time and effort, but if you have time to spend to build your website up, you might as well do these to gain some extra traffic. Many of these are related to SEO, so you there are side benefits as well.

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Essential Internet Marketing Tips for Ecommerce

As you have started your online ecommerce store, chances are you are preparing for an extravagant opening. Advertising and marketing is necessary to inform others of your latest endeavor. Internet marketing is significant for retail stores.

Quit being on the low side and see your website gather cob webs. It doesn’t matter if you trade merchandise online or own a single-page site- there are essential methods to generate increased traffic from your online existence. Enhance your exposure through the following internet marketing tips for ecommerce.

• Press release
Among the most rapid method to let other be informed about your store, products and services is through submitting press releases. Media channels are entirely flourishing on press releases daily. The profusion of online report distribution services make it convenient for retailers to broadcast their latest product lines and special events.

• Product Feeds

Online sellers should be knowledgeable of the benefits of product feeds. This will assist you in widening audience reach. Product feed is merely a file produced from the site which contains product information like photos, pricing, descriptions and specials. These can be sent to shopping comparison sites and search engines.

• Share Your Expertise

There are several methods on how a seller can appear as expert in a particular industry. One approach is to host sessions, workshops or seminars. Another method is to agree to educate relevant continuing courses at local colleges. Online sellers are aware that a well known approach to share expertise and acquire additional exposure is to create content for gratis distribution. Article advertising has the capability to enhance awareness of the sellers existence offline and online.

• Send Out Newsletters

Newsletters and email marketing are the solutions to maintain communication with returning clients and potential buyers. It takes great effort to entice customers. Why would you let a visitor to leave your site without presenting a method to stay in touch?

• Website Submission

Most owners submit their websites to major search engines and relax to anticipate for visitors to come. Sad to say, there is more than just submitting your site. Website owners often overlook the entire directories available.

Search for dedicated link directories as well as niche sites to send your business details and site. This will not only enhance your link popularity, but will drive huge targeted traffic to the online store.

• Personalized Commercials

Online video marketing permits the retailer to expand the contact of their message with a bigger audience for a small investment. Compared with the conventional marketing, creating a unique online advertisement or video to express your message can get a high return of investment.

• Social Networking

LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook and other social networking may be helpful in increasing sales and advertising your products. These are the areas where most of the target audience usually hangs out so you must also be there. Blogs provided on these areas assist the online sellers to be communicating with shoppers, generate announcements, or feature their latest promotions as well as merchandises. This will make it possible to meet new customers.

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