SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization of the pages your website is comprised of. Search Engine Optimization is a very important factor of Internet Marketing and is there to ensure visibility of your pages to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, or Badu. If you make it easy for a Search Engine to read your website pages, the more relevancy and targeting you will achieve for the right keywords. Depending on the amount of links as well as which anchor text is deployed, such methods are vital factors in determining the ranking of keywords when search engines scan your pages.

On-Page SEO is the art of maximizing your visibility to Search Engines by keeping or increasing conversion rates to generate leads and sales on your website. All the traffic in the world is not enough if it does not convert into actual profit.

The Top 10 most important ranking factors for On-Page SEO:

1. Site Structure
2. Unique URLs for each page
3. Unique page title for each page
4. Unique Meta Description for each page
5. Unique H1/H2 tag for each page
6. Only one version of each page, no duplicate content
7. Fast reliable webhosting
8. Enable Compression per Mod_deflate
9. Optimizing of code e.g. no inline CSS, Javascript or Ajax in pages
10. Minify of code for easy clear reading

Off-Page SEO is the creation of awareness to your website. Awareness is normally created through building links, advertisement on other sites and if you are published in Magazine. Text links with targeted anchor text are generally the most desirable way of creating awareness for your website. They have a long-term effect and increase your website ranking across all Search Engines.

The Top 10 most important ranking factors for Off-Page SEO:

1. Text Links with keyword rich Anchor text surrounded by relevant text
2. Text Link to product pages from related websites
3. Customer reviews on review sites like Yelp.com
4. Social Media presence as well as active use of Social Networking sites
5. Local, Industry-related or mainstream Internet Directories
6. Industry-related commenting on other websites
7. Articles on Content Publisher sites like Suite101.com with Footer link
8. Industry-related Forums and Communities
9. Published in print media like Magazines or Newspapers
10. Videos on popular video sites like YouTube

Please let me know what you think or leave a comment.

Last week I wrote about how redesigning your Website is not always the best way to go. It is just sometimes not worth the trouble to completely reinvent the wheel if you already have an existing website business. Sometimes it is better to get an overview from an Internet Marketer to know where you are and what to do next. SEO site reviews are always a good start to get an idea what to do next.

Some of my friends ask me what I think are the most common mistakes e-Commerce sites do to limit its search engine visibility. I will list 5 most common mistakes I encounter while visiting e-Commerce sites on a daily basis. I will use examples from www.frontierpc.com since this company is a typical e-Commerce site that is trying to overachieve without fixing the basics first.

Page Titles

The page title is there to attract visitors to click through your site. Okay, none of the sites here has thought to make the page title less than 66 characters to make it fit nicely on to the search results. A good page title also includes a call to action and some branding for your own company, that helps if somebody uses your page title as anchor text for a link. This will give the visitor a sense of recurring focal points. We humans do not like new things if we get used to something. Emphasizing the brand names and trust symbols will ensure visitors load your site faster and in turn will improve your conversion rate. My suggestion for the page title would be something along of this:

Remember this is a product page, for category pages and other pages it should be more fitting to the content on this given page. Another thing that you need to keep in mind is the conversion cycle when customers look up product names. Customers are now looking for the most trusted source to get the product for a good price so give them what they ask for. Questions to ask yourself are: What is the action on the page the visitor should do? What is the name of the product and price? Viewing the name or url of your business on that page will help to give visitors a sense of reoccurring corporate identity.

There is no perfect or best way to do page titles but to put yourself into the shoes of your potential client. You could also ask some of your clients how they would react to a page title of a product page.

In addition to this, remember that over 60% of all clicks going to the top 3 organic search results is where you get most of your clicks.

Meta Description

This is the meta description of Linksys Gateway in the search results. Yet again, the number of characters is much higher than the recommended 150 to 160 charters so it is cut off again from Google. However, a problem with this meta description is that it does not give any kind of information that would help me to know immediately what to expect on this page. I think using the meta description to provide more detailed information on what to expect on the page is a good practice here.

You can still automate the creation of a Meta Description like this, but if you do so try to bring together the most important information. For example, FrontierPC.com offers one day shipping to most cities in Canada. That is a great selling point since you often end up for a long time if you live in Canada. Test the Meta Description more than once and get some of your colleagues to read over your Meta Description to see how they react to it.

URLS

In the above screenshot you see how the top two search results have the name of the product inside the url.

Both are not very pretty but compared to what FrontierPC.com has in place, almost a quantum jump in evolution.

Not helpful to identify where I’m on the site or what I should expect from this page. In addition, all search engines put a lot of value in finding keywords in the url of a page. For example, the Linksys SPA 2102 Gateway at FrontierPC.com page url should be like this:

A better way to create your urls is to align them with your site structure. In the case of FrontierPC, I could not really figure out their site structure. I will give some examples how you could place a product page into the site structure.

You could create your site structure based on brand names, e.g. brand names are your categories:

Alternatively, you could make your structure based on category names:

This really depends on how you choose to organize your website. I will elaborate on this in the site structure part of this article.

Navigation

The navigation on www.FrontierPC.com is more or less a little difficult, like most PC e-Commerce sites are. However, I will not talk about the user-friendliness of the navigation since the navigation builds your site structure. I will talk about it from an SEO point of view. Most people don’t realize that making something easy to read for search engines often means it makes it easier to read for humans as well. Both don’t react positively on information overflow, both like to follow an easy to use route that does not make them work hard and both hate to get deceived.

The homepage offers a large list of random items. If a visitor lands on your homepage, you could perhaps classify this visitor as a lead. Stuffing random products right into his face could easily let him bounce back and look elsewhere for the product. A better practice is to rather focus on the categories to drive the traffic and page rank downwards into the category pages.

The VoIP Gateways category page does not offer much better navigation than the homepage. If I have no clue which brand I at least prefer I have not much of a chance to find what I’m looking for. At a glance, I can already expect quite a lot of duplicate content in this area of the site. Again, choose to make it simple or as the designing principle goes “Don’t Make Me Think.” Subcategories would be a great way to organize products and the pages can bring you a substantial amount of organic traffic.

The product page from FrontierPC.com does not seem to have any kind of navigation. That is not a bad idea but breadcrumbs would be useful to put in place all over the site. The rest should be determined by some focus groups that test the design.

Site Structure

I could probably go for another 5 pages about how important site structure is and how to implement it but then nobody would read any of my following articles anymore.

The perfect way to structure a website is in a pyramid with the homepage on top, the category pages building the first level, the subcategory pages on the second level and the product pages being the foundation.

As you can see, the deeper  one goes  into the site, the more pages of the same kind are in place. This means as farther away you go from your homepage, the lower the page rank should be for the pages. As I mentioned earlier in this article, it is suggested to align your site structure with your keywords. This means that should put the high value keywords on top and work your way down from here. Product pages don’t need as much page rank as a category page doe.  For example, it is quite impressive how often people search VoIP Gateway.

Summary

Websites like FrontierPC.com that have been around for a while now rank well for many keywords but are often far away from ranking as number one with a lot of pages. If they would manage to get ranking in the Top 2 for around 30 – 50 % of their products they would be happy. Right now, I don’t foresee this achievement anytime soon with the current SEO strategy. I would suggest to them to contact an Internet Marketer first to help them improve their site immediately before spending thousands of dollars on a redesign of the site.

If you would like to get your business review in a post, please click on the contact me now link on top and tell me why.

On a daily basis, I am looking over many e-commerce sites and even though I don’t say it out loud I’m sometimes amazed how already standardized techniques get completely disregarded.

I was checking Vancouver Craigslist the other day and found this ad for computer equipment online store looking for a redesign of their website: http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/van/web/1347519804.html. Nothing wrong with this, it is always good to go with the times.

When I was reading the ad I came across this section:

We are particularly looking for a person with direct ecommerce experience in selling computers, electronics and related products to business clients. Related experience in SEO, natural search, and website usability is preferred. The majority of our clients are from businesses and governments in Canada who locate us via search engines, directories and shopping sites. Our main landing page is our product detail page.

Our website is www.frontierpc.com and our most important pages are the product details pages such as: http://www.frontierpc.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=20170537J

The overall project would involve redesign of: home page, search results page, product details pages and our cart and checkout. There would be a few additional pages as well such as contact us etc.

So I went ahead and checked out their website. Having a product URL like this http://www.frontierpc.com/ProductDetails.aspx?ProductID=20170537J made me think “Maybe SEO would be the first thing to do”. I was actually very pleasantly surprised coming on to the site. The design was clean and for a computer equipment ecommerce site, it was easy to use overall. Not really anything that would justify a complete redesign but there are things to improve from an SEO and conversion optimization point of view. A quick look at their urls tells me there are no rewrite rules in place, when checking the non-www I can already imagine the amount of duplicate content that drags this site down.

The on-page SEO for this store is also not very impressive, sure it is better to have some kind of page title and meta description but c’mon try to make it easy to read or at make it more to-the-point.

Looking at the Category urls http://www.frontierpc.com/SearchView.aspx?c=001011079127&cn=Mobile%20Computers I could see how Frontier PC used their search pages to generate category pages. Little geek tip: read Latent Semantic Indexing from Aaron Wall to understand why it is a very bad idea to give any search engine the capability of indexing your search results.

Nevertheless, I think the biggest disadvantage of this site is that it is so slow. When a page takes almost 30 seconds to load it is a real turn off for most visitors. Also, search engines care a lot about how quickly you can deliver the requested page back. Look at it this way: would you recommend a website to your friend that is always slow? So why should Google do it?

Looking at the page the first positive note is that they are displaying telephone numbers, always very useful to give people more trust into the online business. What I am missing on this site are other trust symbols like Better Business Online or Hacker Safe as example.

This company is a perfect example on how most e-Commerce sites are wasting 40% or more of their potential traffic and even much more revenue.  Your goal should be more returning visitors then new visitors as an e-commerce business since they convert much better than new visitors.

As an example, a few months ago I started a contract with a car performance part company, creating an SEO plan for the development of their website. This is necessary since the system is just out of date. Before I started the project I delivered one of my SEO site reviews for their site. Within a week their traffic went up by almost 50% and stayed steadily ever since.

I would recommend consulting with a dedicated Internet Marketer first to help to identify your challenge and show you better or easier ways of using your budget to drive traffic to your online business instead of completely redesign your site if you feel stuck with the traffic you are getting. This e-Commerce site is a great example where spending money on a complete redesign would be a wasted of investment since the site seems to have already good content and a clean design. If some SEO and other Internet Marketing techniques in place they could easily double their current internet revenue.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

I waited a long time to write my first post and it will not be a long one 🙂
I arrived in Chicago yesterday evening, the first time for me being in Chicago and the first time for me going to a big conference.

I think I didn’t have so much fun like I had yesterday night for a long time.
I don’t remember much since I went to bed at like 5 am and I’m still holding my bottle of water very close 🙂

Right now I enjoy the panels on the conference and took a quick brake to update the site.
I hope that I will have some more time later on to update the site with some more information.

But for now I just wanted to say thanks to Mark Jackson from VIZION Interactive for giving me some advile this morning. And Jim Hedger from WebmasterRadio.fm for being so nice and indruce me to so many people.

More updates soon.