Wondering how to appease Google, the almighty search engine god? You might want to start by figuring out why Google isn’t paying attention to your site. Watch today’s episode of Two Minute Tuesday to get started.
Google got you down? You’re not alone – it’s often hard to appease the search gods.
Fortunately, you can put your ecommerce site in good graces search engines by following some basic SEO strategies. To get started, it’s a good idea to start with what you’re doing wrong. Watch today’s episode to learn five easy ways to improve your site in the eyes of Google.
Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Social Media Manager, Volusion
Here’s the transcript if you’d like to read along:
Hi everybody! My name is Matt and I’m the Social Media Manager here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success.
We’ve heard a lot of talk about search engine optimization, or in other words, getting your site found on Google, but there are several things that might be preventing you from ranking higher in search results. With that in mind, I’d like to present to you my top five reasons why Google hates your ecommerce site.
First and foremost, broken links on your site are a big no-no. Remember, search engine spiders are crawling your site to find and index all of your pages. If you have a link that goes to another page on your site, but doesn’t work, consider the spider squashed. So to get started, check all of your links and make sure that they work correctly.
Second, you need to think about anchor text. For example, if you have a link within a sentence, the words within that link are considered your anchor text. Within this anchor text, you want to include keywords, if possible. For example, if your anchor text says “click here,” you aren’t doing yourself any SEO favors. Instead, make sure that your anchor text, also known as text links, includes a specific keyword.
Third, never use product descriptions straight from the manufacturer. While they might sounds nice, there are a million other sites using the exact same description, so create something that’s unique so Google will hate you less.
Fourth, if you’re not using alt text within your search engine optimization strategy, you’re missing the boat. Alt text is the keyword text that describes your images. Remember, Google can’t read images, so you have to use keywords that tell Google what those images are about. Thus, always optimize your alt text.
Last but not least, watch out for key cannibalization. Cannibalization is not looked highly upon in any society, and Google doesn’t like it either. In other words, if you’re optimizing for the same keyword across every single page of your site, Google doesn’t know which page is most important page for that keyword, so keep them to a minimum for certain pages and you’ll be in good shape.
Hopefully these five reasons why Google hates your ecommerce site will allow you to turn them back around and get lots of love and accolades. If you have any questions, we’re always happy to help.
From me to you, happy selling!
Regarding item 4) Alt Text – The volusion system is awesome for adding alt text to product images as it has a simple data field in the product admin and for most other site images it can be added using the on-page editor…BUT… there are two images within my template – ‘Free Shipping icon’ and ’1×1 spacer.gif’ that score me bad marks (using SEO adviser sites such as aboutus.org) as they appear all over the place and I can’t find how to add alt text to these unilaterally. Any advice how to do that? I can find the 1×1 spacer on-page and add the alts to each one, but on a site with 2000+ products it’s going to get tedious.
Can you recommend a couple of company who can build our ecommerce website in metro New York using your program?