![]() |
Search Engine Opimisation (SEO)To be successful online you need to be found by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo but there are hundreds of others as well.The way that they work is to crawl around the internet with automated programs that look for websites and pages, and they then read and copy the content of the page to their servers (called cache) and save them. When you go to a search engine such as Google and search on a keyword the search engine will look up information that it has indexed in the cache and return a result. If your online store or website has not been crawled and indexed then your website will not be shown in the results. The search engine also looks at the content and tries to identify keywords that will give an indication as to what the page is all about. There are certain tags (fields) used in the HTML that the search engine will look at and prioritise to determine the page importance. The best way to ensure that you get a good result with SEO is to have good, well written and original content with we discuss in Step 4. Your webpage will be ranked by the search engine to determine where it will appear in search results. The rank is a factor of page content quality and also popularity (i.e. more visitors means a better result). Google now has over 80% of all searches online and so is really important to your business success. More than 53% of all sales (off-line and online) will result from research or browsing online. So you have to be search friendly. Search Engine Optimisation - Built-inThere are various features of ePages 6 which have been built specifically to improve Search Engine Opimisation. You can Contact eCorner to receive your copy of "eCorner ePages Search Engine Advice for ePages 6" PDF. URLSession IDs often generate long chains of letters and numbers in the URL, (starting with "ID=" or "session=") and include a number of parameters (represented in the URL with question marks "?" followed by characters interspersed with ampersands "&"). These do not work well with search engines.
The URL in ePages has been shortened to make it easier for the user to understand the results a search engine displays. Here are some examples:
Search Engine Optimisation CockpitePages now provides a center for search engine optimisation advice right in the administation control panel of your online store. This helps you to obtain the best possible results without wasting a lot of hard earned money. Short URLsEvery ePages 6 Cloud based online store comes with an ability to define short, keyword based, URLs to replace the data base genreated URLs. Short URLs can be used to help your visitors more easily remember your shop pages access. By creating the Short URLs using your product and business keywords you can also help improve your search engine optimisation. Keywords and TagsHTML provides for sections (tags) in a Web page which are not displayed in a browser but can be evaluated by a search engine. Search engines ignore some of these because they were often misused in the past. In general, keywords should be distributed uniformly over the whole page. Title-TagThe TITLE tag is the most important element for SEO. It is of course used in ePages 6. It is automatically filled with the product name followed by the shop name. The Title should always start with the probable search term. The company name comes next. This also fulfils the requirement that every subpage has a unique TITLE tag so that the shop can be found using many different search terms. Meta-TagsePages 6 supports two META tags automatically these are "keywords" and "description". ePages allows you to access and add any special HTML or CSS code to the website Head area. Meta tags have varying relevance for search engines. The short description of the product and category is written in the description attribute automatically:
The TITLE and the META tags are found at the top of the HTML document inside the HEAD tag. H-TagsH tags are used for headings in HTML and are important for search engines. ePages 6 uses the heading levels H1 to H3. Examples:
Alt-TagsALT tags are used for labelling pictures. ePages 6 automatically enters the product name here as well. alt="Eureka El Capitan IV" Search engines classify ALT tags as important if the graphic is found within a link. This is so in ePages 6 as pictures of categories and products are always links. Social NetworksThe online store comes equiped with gadgets to link to social networks such as Twitter and YouTube. By linking and sharing the imformation on your website you can help attract new customers and also improve your SEO ranking. Forums and BlogsSome of the Cloud Shops packages come with the ability to create Blogs and Forums as well as Guest books and Media Galleries right inside your online store. These caan help you better service your customers as well as improving visibility to search engines. Product Reviews and RatingProduct reviews and ratings are great to help you get feedback from your customers. By displaying the product review and ratings on your product detail page you can provide great information to visitors. search engines will crawl, index and rank information on product reviews and ratings. With a package from eCorner it is all included.
When you are ready you can move on to Step 7 - All the legal stuff. Return to the 10 Steps Home Page. After you have completed the registration we will email you the links to your 30 day free trial store. Check your email for your welcome message and instructions. NO Credit Card is required to start a trial. |