It’s time to get started with SEO strategies to help your organic search rankings before the holidays come. Why? Google can take awhile to notice changes.

As you may know, SEO takes some time to show improvement. Turnaround is not as quick as a Pay Per Click campaign in which one strategy change, such as raising bids or changing ad copy, can have immediate results. With SEO, some changes may have faster results than others, but it can take days or even months to see a stable outcome.

For example, with basic SEO best practices, such as optimizing title tags, results can be seen within a couple of days on Google.  Sometimes they’re even quicker to show up on Bing. This also depends on how often your site is crawled by search engines, but on average, optimization of title tags gives quick, positive changes on the main pages of your site, which are usually crawled more often.

For an example, let’s consider our site, Volusion.com. Before we deployed our site redesign, a lot of our deeper pages weren’t effectively optimized with targeted keywords. Because of this lack of optimization, many of these deeper pages couldn’t be found within the first 100 search results in Google for targeted keywords. After the redesign, these pages were updated to target long tail keywords, which are less competitive and have less search volume.

But why target keywords with low search volume?
These terms are still good traffic drivers and usually have higher conversion rates than more general keywords. The launch date for our site redesign was on a Friday. The marketing team made sure to have title tags and content optimized for the new pages; we made sure to get everything in order for the new site to get crawled and indexed effectively; we implemented the XML and HTML sitemaps, set Google Webmaster Tools, etc.  I checked rankings that Friday before the launch, let the weekend go by, and by Monday morning, I had the site ranking for 30 new targeted keywords within the Google Search Results. The positions weren’t great for some of the keywords, but at least our pages were somewhere to be found within the top 50 search results. Clearly, changing our keyword targeting strategy paid off.

This also applies to links within and to your site.  There are some links that may take months to add value to your site’s SEO, depending on the value (to the search engine) and relevance of the page linking back to you, and also the competitiveness of the keyword that you may have used as anchor text within the link. One important thing that I pay attention to when making changes is stability. After any type of change, you may see a huge jump or drop for a couple of days, but then it stabilizes. That’s why it’s very important to keep track of your rankings, especially after a big change, like in my case, a redesign.

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Every Tuesday, the Volusion team will be posting quick educational videos to help you further succeed online. Today’s episode teaches you some basic ways to better integrate your ecommerce site with social media efforts.

Happy Tuesday! Hope you’re having a great build-up before the Labor Day holiday here in the US. Since you’re already online finalizing your vacation plans, why not take two minutes to learn how to align social media with your ecommerce site? It’s all pretty basic – figure out what you want to do and stick with it.

If there are any topics that you’d like covered in future videos, feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email directly at matthew_winn(at)volusion(dot)com.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Online Communications Specialist, Volusion

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After hosting our very popular webinar, SEO Tips Every Site Owner Should Know, last week, we wanted to answer a few extra questions we didn’t have time to address during our time slot. Read on to learn even more tricks to climb search engine rankings.

Last Thursday we hosted our webinar, SEO Tips Every Site Owner Should Know, to help online merchants conquer search engines and help drive more organic traffic to their sites. We were very pleased with the turnout and were thrilled to see so many questions about such an important topic!

Of course there are only so many questions one can answer in a limited time frame, so our SEO guru, Pam Cofer, took some time to tackle five of the most popular questions we weren’t able to get to during the webinar event. If you’d like to see the webinar recording, check it out here.

Let’s get started!

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How do I research keywords?
Keyword research is an extensive process of brainstorming, analyzing and narrowing down keywords that best fit a certain page. The first thing you need to do is come up with as many keywords as possible for the page you’re working on, then narrow down that list to about 3 to 5 keyword phrases that you will use to optimize that page. Also make sure to look at what non-paid keywords are already driving traffic to your site, so you can continue to target any keywords that are converting well for your business. Checking out the tags on competitor sites can certainly help you brainstorm keywords when you’re getting started, but be sure you are only looking at keywords that are actually relevant to the page of your site you are optimizing.

There is not just one approach to keyword analysis, but there are tools out there to help you. The Google Keyword Tool can help you determine the monthly search volume for a keyword, and Google Trends and Google Insights are other helpful (and free!) tools for gaining deeper insight into online search behavior related to your business. There are also paid tools like Wordstream and Keyword Discovery.

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Do I need to submit to directories?
Submitting to web directories (which are kind of like online phone books) is one way to build links, but it should NOT be the only link building technique you use. It’s a good way to get started if you don’t have many links, especially for a new site, but as we mentioned in the webinar, you’ll get the best results if you have inbound links from a variety of sources.

If you are going to submit to directories, make sure they are as relevant as possible, and do not submit to a lot of directories at once. Since link building should be natural, submitting to directories should follow a natural progression as well.

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Does it help to have a blog on your website? How do I get a blog?
Having a blog in and of itself isn’t what helps your site, but using a blog as a tool to build relationships and gain authority by regularly publishing content for your target audience can have numerous benefits. The content is indexed quickly, gives other sites content to link to, and basically gives your content more opportunities to appear in the search results. It can also drive traffic to your store when you are strategically linking to your main site. (more…)

This week, Volusion was recognized by the esteemed charity, March of Dimes, for our contributions to the organization this year.

One of our core values is to “Rock the Golden Rule.” This means that we treat others as we want to be treated and care for each other, our customers and our community. This week, we completely rocked out the golden rule by being awarded “Best New Team” by the Austin March of Dimes for the March for Babies 2010 event.

Our team participated in raffles, contributed donations, and marched in the event itself. Better yet, after all the contributions from the team was tallied, Volusion made a 100% match to double our amount! This led to a whopping $6,000 to support this charitable cause and earn us the distinguished honor.

While we’ve gathered tons of pride for awards that herald our software, nothing matches the sense of goodwill we take from winning awards like these. We can’t wait for the 2011 event!

Happy (and charitable selling!)
-Matt Winn, Online Communications Specialist, Volusion

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Check out some pictures from our efforts:

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Team Austin. The guy in the midriff shirt got an extra $50 donation for walking around like that. Whatever it takes to help the cause!

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A special spot on our awards shelves for this one.

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A shot from the ceremony.

Three Volusion customers will be featured in tomorrow morning’s Ecommerce Strategy Roundtable, where these online business owners will receive personal advice on various issues and questions that impact their business. Tune in to take in their lessons and apply them to your business!

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Want to get some objective, free business advice? We’ve got just the place for you. Check out tomorrow’s 1M/1M Ecommerce Strategy Roundtable, co-hosted by leading entrepreneurial advocate Srmana Mitra and Volusion. This roundtable is a piece within a series of events hosted under Srmana’s 1M/1M initiative, which is an effort to help one million entrepreneurs reach one million dollars in revenue.

Each roundtable allows business owners to pitch their business to Srmana and a panel of experts to evaluate their business standing and get answers to their questions. Clearly, this is a great way to apply these answers and lessons to your own ecommerce store. The event takes place tomorrow, August 26 at 11am EST/8am PST. If you’d like to register the event, visit the roundtable registration page.

And to make things even more interesting, we’re proud to announce that three Volusion customers have made the cut to star in the event. These include: LA Plates, EcoMowers and Shop Adorn.

You won’t want to miss it! Don’t forget, these roundtables take place at the same time every week, so feel free to attend or pitch your business to be featured.

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Happy selling!