Earlier this month we profiled eBay seller Kasey Baxter, who recently launched his first off-eBay shop. In launching a new retail site, Baxter felt that he needed search engine optimization (SEO) to boost traffic to the site, but he didn’t know where to start.
Tim Nebergall, SEO Web design engineer and director of Front Page Rankings, Inc., says that most Web sites are not built with SEO in mind. For Weaim2pleez Knife Shop, Nebergall offered up SEO tips and advice to help this site perform better in search engine results.
Tips for Using Keywords in Key Areas
The first step should be to examine your code. Certain code detracts from the way a search engine will rank a site for relevancy. Cascading Style Sheets (CCS), for instance, don’t mean anything to search engines. Where possible, move the CSS code off individual pages of your Web site and into a separate folder. Then, use a single line of HTML to reference the CSS code.
According to Nebergall, at least 80-percent of your main page should be text, with the balance being code. Your site should also be W3C-compliant to ensure that people can view your site correctly—and don't use code that works only in some browsers.
The second step for new Web shop owners is to work on their site’s metadata —everything that fits in between the <head> and </head> tags on the page—such as the Title, Description, Subject and Classification.
Baxter’s Web shop uses “^9Weaim10^ Knives” as the title. Unless people search for that exact phrase, this title is not relevant. “The title is forty-percent of the relevancy,” explained Nebergall. “Be sure to use the primary search terms [keywords] you want associated with your site, like hunting knives or pocket knives and reference in phrases like discount or bargain prices.”
Here, Baxter could use secondary phrases like outdoors and hunting, whichever are more popular searches. Google indexes 150 characters in the Title, but the keywords must be placed in the first 70 characters.
The Description is also important. This is the text under the Title on the search engine results page (SERP). Here you should use your most compelling sales copy and include both primary and secondary keywords. The Description can be up to 250 characters, but since Google truncates everything after the 168th character, get the most important details in before that cut-off point.
Other important tags include Classification and Subject. Classification can take up to 100 characters, and is used to determine relevancy along with the Subject tag, which can take up to 150 characters. Don't worry about tidy writing for eitehr tag; just make sure to include all your keywords (primary, secondary and tertiary).
Google doesn’t use the Keywords for relevancy (although other search engines do). In Google, Nebergall said, Keywords just adds to your keyword density — that is the percentage of the number of times a particular keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words on a page. Don’t use more than 250 characters in your keyword field as anything after that isn’t indexed.
Google also likes fresh content, but Nebergall says you don’t need to constantly overhaul your articles. Instead, add to existing content and weight it for your key search terms. Don’t overweight the keywords as Google will see that as spam. Nebergall recommends keywords to be 1.75 to 2.5 percent of all text on your site.
Design: As Important as SEO
Nebergall believes there is a lot of SEO information out there that focuses only on backlinks and article writing, which is misleading.
“You have to bring Web site design and SEO together,” Nebergall said. “Just concentrating on one but not the other is like having a Ferrari with no engine. SEO Web-design engineering is all about finding the perfect balance between pretty and relevant.”
Nebergall also offered design tips for the ^21Weaim22^ Knife shop. He said that the money-making real estate on a Web site is the place where a visitor focuses his or her attention—in this case, the upper left-hand area above ^23Weaim24^ navigation bar. Here we see a search box, but this space on any Web shop should be reserved for an eye-pleasing, relevant graphic and your best-of-the-best sales copy.
This site should also focus on providing a look and feel that matches a customer's expectations. For example, many customers looking to purchase this type of product might be outdoorsmen or hunters. Nebergall recommends providing, relevant, compelling imagery and text that appeals to that demographic.
Knowing When to Invest in SEO
SEO tips like Nebergall’s are a good starting point for new Web shop owners. If you don’t have a big budget for SEO (experts are available from anywhere from $60 to $650 an hour), knowing when to invest in SEO will save you in the long run.
Nebergall recommends that you first work on site design. When you start making sales, it’s the right time to spend money on site development and SEO. Finding the right person for the job can be daunting, and Nebergall cautions that a higher rate doesn’t mean a better expert. He says to start the process by asking, “What would you do for my site?”
The SEO expert you want to hire will do more than just throw out words like backlinking and discuss off-site factors. "You can do all the SEO you want, but in the end it won't do any good if you do not also provide a Web site with compelling text, sales copy and relevant images,” said Nebergall.
SEO, the performance part of Web engineering, will only help people find you in the search engines. Once a customer lands on your site, it’s your site design that will encourage the sales.
Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.
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