Ecommerce websites are web pages designed for businesses. These are designed to help build the brand’s name and widen its reach online. As a commercial type of website, its needs are different from other types of websites such as blogs, forums and directories among others. What further complicates the situation is that companies are often unwilling to shell out the necessary funding for online marketing campaigns. Such companies are missing out on opportunities to generate additional leads and increase sales. Here are a few tips aimed to help reduce issues with designing ecommerce sites.
5 SEO Strategies for Ecommerce Sites
1. Create exciting products and product pages
Get people talking about the company’s products by designing amazing product pages. Try to create a work of art with each page you design. Upload content that people will find useful. Mix it up by incorporating different types of media including articles, images, product videos and more. The products themselves do not have to be interesting. It is all about the presentation and types of data to include with each page.
If the company does not have interesting products to share, an alternative is to make up one. Some companies conjure made up products that get people talking. This gets people fascinated about your company enough that they want to check it out or even link to it.
2. Include Instructographics
If infographics are not exciting enough for your website, why not design instructographics instead? Instructographics are images that include instructions on how to do things or create items. In a culture that enjoys looking at and sharing pictures, designing instructographics is one way to create interest while providing important information at the same time.
3. Learn about the competition
Know who the competition is and what they are doing to garner attention. Understand what makes them popular. Draw inspiration from their techniques, improve their methods and apply them to the company website.
4. Making sharing easy
Make it easy for people to share your content to their networks by including share widgets or buttons as well as embedding codes. Allowing people to share the content will boost the number of people that see the content and help drive traffic to the website.
5. Include rewards
Encourage people to invite their contacts to see the website. Make the offer more enticing by including incentives. Reward them for their efforts by giving them something in return. Including a simple thank you note can also work wonders.
5 Don’ts in Optimizing Websites
1. Use black hat strategies
Black hat strategies are SEO techniques that are considered illegal. Use of such techniques may cause major search engines to penalize the website or even shut it down. Focus your efforts on building up the brand the legal way to avoid facing such issues in the future.
2. Take the effort too lightly
Optimizing websites is not a one-time chore. Much like the company’s other marketing campaigns, the act requires a lot of time, effort and resources to produce positive results and maintain these results or improve on them. It is important to find an SEO expert that specializes in that particular niche or can show results for companies within the same niche.
3. Stuff the content with keywords
In the past, optimization involved using and reusing the same set of keywords with all of the company’s content in an effort to rank well for that exact phrase. Major search engines consider this as spam content and may even penalize your website for it. Avoid hiding text by making the font color blend in with the background. Google may ban you for such attempts.
4. Post duplicate content
Creating unique and interesting content for ecommerce websites can be difficult as companies want their websites to feature and promote the products or services being offered by the brand. However, people tire easily from reading duplicate content. They want to learn something new each time they browse through the website. In cases wherein posting duplicate content is unavoidable, one technique you can try out is to prevent spider bots from crawling the page.
5. Get links to unrelated websites
There are numerous directories and websites that gather emails to send spam mail. Google discourages websites from applying to link farms, hybrid search engines and some types of directories and may even penalize websites that are found doing so.