In the e-commerce world, if SEO isn't everything to you, then you are more than a few steps behind. For most e-tailers working on a shoe-string margin -- cost is everything. Everything that you can do to increase profit margin can and must be done. An excellent way to do this is through the implementation of SEO tactics. I mean, how can you argue against this? Free traffic is free traffic.
I've had the opportunity to work with many SEO companies and to be honest, I am not very impressed. SEO has grown into this magical entity, where most people think it takes someone with the hands of God to produce. In reality, this is not the case at all.
SEO comes down to a small set of rules and techniques. Mainly, it's about good content. Put yourself in the shoes of Google. If you were making a search engine, you would want your users to get search results with the best content, right? Well of course. I don't want to have to wade through 1,000's of pages to find the one I'm really looking for. So, how does one get good content? Well, it really boils down to writing content rich descriptions, that aren't flooded with the keywords you're looking to target. Just having this content is important, but what will really set you apart from the rest is how and where you place this content. Let's first start out on defining the main elements of a web page.
1) Page Title.
This is what you see at the top of your browser. It's one of the most important pieces of your page. It should clearly state what your page is about. It shouldn't be too long, but one or two words won't cut it either.
2) Page URL.
This should be very similar to the page title. It will not only add to SEO value, but when a users see's it, they will have more confidence in clicking it because of it's description. Example: http://www.mydomain.com/options-trading.html. It's not to hard to figure out what this page is about without even clicking on it.
3) Meta keywords and descriptions.
This is basically a way to tell search engine crawlers a little more about your page. It should basically follow the lines of your page title, but go into a little more depth.
4)<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.. tags.
You want to place these tags at the beginning of sections on your page. It will designate what's most important (in terms of content) on your page.
5) Paragraph (<p>) tags.
Sections that are surrounded by <p> tags are meant to go into depth on what your page is really about. Since you've already told the search engines what the general topic is about, with your page title, meta and h* tags; your p tags are for the nitty gritty. Your user is really here for these. So although,they aren't #1 on the list, they are definitely very important because without them, your page would just be a title. Let's not forget that creating a successful website is not just about making the search engines happy, but making the user happy as well. I mean that's why you're creating this to begin with.
6) Link (<a>) tags. Since web pages are broken down into multiple pages (preventing the need to have a page long enough to reach Pluto and back), we use links to allow the user to easily navigate to a particular section. An important factor to remember when creating links is to always remember to include the title attribute to further describe what the link is pointing to. Another good measure is to follow links with a more in-depth description of what it's about. For example, if you wanted to link to a page about options trading, you would want something like this:
<a title="Investing in Options" href="/options.html">Options Trading</a> Options trading can be a very lucrative venture. One must realize that in the stock market, there are normal stocks and there are options. Options allow one to have the "option" to purchase a stock at a certain date/time and strike price.
7) Link backs.
I was thinking about putting this higher in the list, but decided that 1-6 should be done much sooner than this one. Link backs should only be done once you have your website up and running. Once you get to this step, you'll find that it's very time consuming and tedious. Link backs are links from other sites that link to yours. It's like vouching for another web site. Just like in real life, someone vouching for someone else adds confidence. An important factor here is that the "importance" of the person vouching for you is most important. If I have a few CEO's from large companies saying that I'm a hard worker, wouldn't that be better than having 50 bumbs off of the street saying the same? So, getting other important web sites to link to your site will make you look a lot more appealing to search engines. The goal would be to find web sites with a high Google Page Rank and get a link on their site pointing to yours. I should point out, that if the link has a rel="nofollow" attribute in it, it will be useless in terms of SEO.
This process can be a little tricky though; there are a lot of companies that offer a way to "buy" link backs. I would not recommend going this route, as it can upset Google and you could end up getting a permanent ban from their search engine. Stick with the basics -- just get in contact with sites that you want links from, and just ask them. You'd be surprised how much just being nice can do for you. You may be asking, well how do I find these sites? Well a good starting point, would be to download a program like SEO Elite. This program shows you all the links that other sites (let's start with competitors) are getting. I would start out by contacting these sites and seeing if you can come to some arrangement to either trade links or provide some kind of service in return.
This should point you in the right direction. Once you start getting back links, you won't see much of an impact for several months (Google likes to take it's time when calculating Page Ranks mainly because of spam prevention purposes).
In conclusion, if you stick to what's natural, and just produce a quality web site that makes your users happy, you will most likely make the search engines happy. There's no magic involved here, so don't be fooled by companies pitching a "#1 on Google guarantee".
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