You’re working hard to market your company and make sure you appear in search. Writing your descriptions, optimising images, and mastering most of the other elements of effective search engine optimisation (SEO). However, if you’re anything like many of the many e-commerce merchants we speak to, you may be struggling with meta descriptions. Meta descriptions don’t directly effect your SEO. Search engines like Google will simply take a snippet of page text if you don’t set your own meta description. Page click through does affect your search engine ranking though. If no one clicks on the link to your page, search engines will assume it is not a relevant result. More importantly, if people don’t click to visit your site,… Read more »
Category: Search
5 Easy SEO Essentials For Your E-Commerce Site
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of those things that can often be overlooked during the exhausting process of designing and building a new e-commerce website. It’s completely understandable as it’s challenging enough to create something that looks good and does everything it should – from showcasing your products to checkout and payment. As this is all part of the user experience they are (with good reason) prioritised with time and resource. SEO practices on the other hand (if done well) usually go unnoticed by the user and because of it, can often be dismissed when building a site. This is always to the detriment of the business, because SEO can deliver fantastic return on investment. The good news is… Read more »
How To Take Great eBay Product Photos…
Images are more important today than ever before on eBay. Not only are gallery pictures in search results bigger, but the images can also be zoomed in and enlarged right from the top of the view item page. There are no real secrets to taking great photos, but there are some tips for optimizing your eBay pictures. Almost any modern camera will suffice for taking eBay product shots, but try to choose one with a macro setting. The macro will allow you to take close up shots ideal for small objects such as jewelry and for displaying features such as the yarn on a knitted garment. Even modern mobile phones have high resolution cameras built in and if you have… Read more »
Why eBay item specifics are important
Item Specifics have always been important on eBay, but never more so than today. In some categories such as Clothes Shoes and Accessories they’re absolutely essential if you want your products to be found, but in truth your sales will be harmed if you don’t use them in all the categories that you list in. The task has been made somewhat easier for certain products for which eBay have catalog data, but in other categories it’s up to you the seller to fill out Item Specifics. So what exactly do Item Specifics do? Well you’ve probably noticed that whenever you search for an item on eBay you have the ability to narrow down your search using the left navigation bar.… Read more »
Social Media as a Marketing Opportunity
As an eBay seller it’s easy to get caught up in the everyday graft of just keeping your operation running. You might be drowning in brown tape and jiffy bags and making sure you make it to the post office in time, but remember there’s a whole world out there. eBay is a walled garden. It’s busy and has millions of buyers for you. But there’s more to the internet than eBay. You can boost your eBay sales by marketing online. One of the most talked about opportunities is social media marketing. That means sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and other activities such as blogging. Twitter has grown phenomenally in the past year or so and is now… Read more »
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Useful Tools..
OK, so over the last couple of years, I’ve been asked many times what our clients can do to further optimise eBay Stores and listings, as well as their existing e-commerce websites and blogs. I found myself giving out the same websites and useful tools over and over. I realised there wasn’t an up-to-date list out there to suit this purpose, so decided I’d start one here… What is it? “A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!” OK, so why would I use it? I like this site as it’s very fast at giving you an overall… Read more »
DNS Changes and Cname with 123-reg
As a support consultant we advise our customers use the Cname function with their ChannelAdvisor store to improve search engine optimisation. This is an example of a Cnamed Channeladvisor store : Bling Bling Online. As you can see by clicking on the categories how the URLs seem to be coming from the domain name and not a ChannelAdvisor storefront URL. The domain name registrar (who you brought your domain name from) governs the process of the DNS changes and as I come across the different hosts I will post a simple guide on how to cname using that host. My first guide is going to be about 123-reg.co.uk. I always recommend this company as they will also host your emails… Read more »
Blogging for customers!
The buzz word of 2006 was web 2.0. ‘Oh its so Web 2.0’ you might hear at conferences and seminars. My take on web 2.0 is building a community for your buyers based on the product type on offer. Your customers are moving to on-line sales but they need your advice. Truthful, simple advice without the hard sell. First magazines, gossip columns and newspapers caught onto the blog wave, but now product sellers are paving the way to help the customer make the right purchase. Adverts may be boring and invasive at times but Blogs are not, take ‘Innocent smoothies‘ they have a web log that provides an interesting insight to their origins, ethics and the people in the company.… Read more »
Google Analytics to increase your e-commerce performance..
Matt Cutts, A Google employee currently heading up Google’s WebSpam team, has recently posted a good article on Google Analytics, giving you a sample of the depth of information you can access using this free web based service from Google. This data is interesting to look at for sure, but for those of you who run an e-commerce business, knowing your statistics (top keywords, referring URLs, traffic trends, etc) can help you to save time and money. For example, Google Adwords is implemented within Google Analytics, so finding what your top keywords based on your site data, and implementing these into your Google Adwords campaigns in order to increase performance is a much more straight forward process. You could also… Read more »
Google & Yahoo collaborate in Sitemaps.org
Incase you haven’t yet heard, Google & Yahoo have launched a collaborative site www.sitemaps.org. Sitemaps provide webmasters and content providers to submit new and existing content to search engines. Unified As any webmaster will know, publishing content to multiple search engines can be a somewhat tedious task, so this unified approach will bring a new standard, and a more efficient approach to submitting your website(s), and the search engine industry as a whole. Just because a level playing field has been agreed in the form of www.sitemaps.org, don’t expect to see the exact same result rankings when searching Yahoo or Google, as each of these companies still have their own search algorhythms and ranking criteria. However, submitting content to all… Read more »