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Five Steps to Optimizing an eCommerce Site for Search Engines

This series of articles will cover how SEO can help eCommerce sites to be optimized for search engines.

A Systematic Approach to Implementing SEO on an eCommerce Website

Introduction to SEO

Creating a popular website is more than just having a good idea; in order for a website to succeed it needs to produce a steady stream of incoming traffic, and to do that cost effectively, you need to implement solid SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and is what allows search engines like Google and Yahoo! to find your website.

If you perform a search on Google for anything, how many pages do you typically look through before choosing one of the search results? If you're like 97% of the population, you pick a result on the first page. Not only that, you probably click on one of the top 3 or 4 results. It makes sense then that those websites receive exponentially more visitors than a website located on the 2nd, 3rd, or 7th page. The purpose of SEO is to rank your website among those top results, based on common search phrases related to the subject matter of your eCommerce site.

SEO has become so popular that we're at the point where any website that doesn't utilize SEO techniques is sure to fail. That's not a doomsday prophecy; it's just the nature of the beast. Luckily, basic SEO can be done by anyone, although for top Google ranking you should work with an experienced SEO service.

Any type of eCommerce website is essentially dead in the water without at least some form of SEO strategy. The whole purpose of these websites is to sell a product – if nobody's looking, nobody's buying. Any salesman also knows that sales are about numbers. You might only sell one product for every 50 people who view your website, but if you're bringing in 80,000 unique page views per month, you start to build a steady stream of income.