Posts Tagged ‘SEO tools’
SEO Tips and Tricks for eBay Listings
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
As an eBay retailer, getting traffic to your store and auctions is critical to your business’ success. The most successful eBay businesses use search engine optimization (SEO) tips and tricks to get their eBay store and auction listings to show up in the natural listings of search engines like Google and Yahoo. An increase in traffic to your store and listings gives more people the opportunity to purchase your items, thus increasing your sales and profits.
The best SEO tips and tricks for eBay sellers
Make a keyword-rich listing title - The title of your listing is the number-one way that people will find your auction listings. Your title should be descriptive and have at least two of the most important keywords or keyword phrases for the item(s) that you are selling.
Add keywords and content to the item description - Without overdoing it, use as many of the most relevant keywords and keyword phrases in each of your item descriptions. Search engines love new content, so instead of copying and pasting information from the manufacturer’s website, create your own. Strive to make each of your descriptions 250-500 words in length, and be as descriptive as possible, mentioning brand names, model numbers and variations in spellings (kidclips, kid clips, kid klips, etc.).
Create an eBay store - If you don’t already have an eBay store, create one and take advantage of many tools available:
* Use all your custom store pages - Be sure to use every one of your store’s pages, using lots of keyword-rich content for each.
* Update store keywords - To keep your keywords fresh for the search engines, it’s a good idea to reset your store’s keywords every few months. Just go into the “marketing tools and search engine keywords” page from your store’s management page and create a new list of keywords.
* Create an About Me page - This is one of the few places on eBay where you can add links in your content, so take advantage. Put links to your store, specific auction pages, and other promotional pages you may have set up. Remember, search engines love new content, so update your page frequently with new information about your store and your products.
When you take advantage of all the SEO tools that eBay has to offer, bringing traffic to your store is easier than ever! And, best of all, each of these tools is easy to use and no html or special coding is required; you can do each of them all on your own.
Tags: boosting traffic, Carrie Hinkel, E-Commerce and E-Business, ebay, eBay Edge, SEO tools
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Small Business Resource Review: IBP SEO Tool
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
One of the most important factors in any business’s success is the visibility they have to their potential customers, especially online. Whereas local newspaper and trade magazine advertising is a little easier due to the format only allowing a certain amount of advertising space, online advertising is a different story altogether. With thousands of competitors, your business will disappear unless you have a strong presence.
Once of the ways of doing this is by using Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is a multi-faceted process where your website is optimized with keywords related to your business, therefore pushing you up the natural search rankings with Google and other search engines. The higher placed you are, the more visible you’ll become to people looking for your type of company. However, unless you’re an SEO expert, you’d normally have to hire a specialist company to run your SEO campaign for you, and this can run into thousands of dollars, which is a lot to pay if you’re a small to medium business. Thankfully, there’s an answer that will allow you to get strong results yourself.
The IBP Internet Business Promoter ($449.95 for the Business Edition) is a key tool for any small business that needs to increase its online presence. Easy to use, and hugely effective, it allows you a number of useful ways to increase your Google ranking and track your performance as well, to ensure that you’re keeping up to date with any changes that Google or other search engines make to the way your website is indexed and ranked.
Currently in its 10th incarnation, some of the key features that the IBP software includes are:
* Search engine submission to all the major search engines as well as thousands of smaller ones
* Keyword analysis, helping you use the most effective keywords for promoting your business and website online
* Top 10 ranking optimization
* Link popularity builder
* Search engine ranking checker
These features and numerous more are similar to the ones that SEO specialists use to help you climb the rankings on Google, and stay there. For a fraction of the price, however, you can now do this yourself, and the good news is that it’s relatively straightforward.
For example, the Top 10 ranking optimizer is an excellent tool that actually trawls the Internet and gets the keywords and descriptions that your competitors are using to attain their high placement with Google. All you do is set up a project for your website, type in the keywords for the audience you’re looking for, and set the program running. It will find the Top 10 websites on Google or your preferred search engine with these keywords, and show you how these companies are using them. You simply take the best ones and implement them on your own site.
Using this software has seen users appear on the first page of Google when searching for their particular niche. And with the tracking as well as performance tools, you can make sure that once you’re on the first page, you’ll stay there. One thing you do need to know, however, is that SEO is not something you do once and forget it. It’s a continual process and will not yield results overnight, or even in a week or two. IBP may get you started, but you can’t just stuff keywords into your site’s text and expect a number one ranking. Your visitors come first - so design and optimize your site for them first, and then for the search engines.
One of the downsides to the IBP software is that is doesn’t really allow for multiple search engine optimization - the changes you make to your website are for the search engine you set the project up with. So, if you optimize for Google, you’ll probably not receive the same results for Yahoo or MSN. But with Google being the dominant search engine anyway, it’s not that big a problem.
Tags: E-Commerce and E-Business, Marketing, Marketing Your Business, search engine optimization, SEO tools, Small Business Resources, small business tools
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Really Simple Ways to Use RSS on Your Website
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is the format that is used for syndicating news, updates and other web content. It is a way to give your customers more of what they are looking for, without the need for them to have to go into your website and search for it. RSS allows people to get website information by way of a “feed”. In order to receive an RSS feed, you need a newsreader - these are available all over the web; some are free (Pluck , Google Reader ) and others charge a fee (Newsgator ).
Now you may think “but I want my customers to visit my website, how else will they buy my products?” Well, unfortunately it’s many times not a choice of visiting your site or getting an RSS feed. It’s more the choice of getting an RSS feed or not visiting your site at all. Publishing your website’s new information via RSS feed keeps your company (and its products or services) fresh in people’s minds, then when they’re ready to buy, there’s a good chance they’ll remember your products (and your website).
If my company publishes updates through RSS feeds, will my customers automatically get my updates?
No, your customers would have to subscribe to your RSS feed in order to get your updates. Otherwise, you can imagine how incredibly junked up and useless RSS feeds would be, if any company could send their information to anyone’s feed. So, when someone signs up with a newsreader, he or she then sets the preferences as to which websites they want to receive RSS feeds from.
What types of information can go on an RSS feed?
Pretty much anything, but the key to a good RSS feed is to make it information your customers would be most interested in. If you are a restaurant, your feed might have weekly or daily menu specials listed. If your site sells the latest in fashion gear, then how about a feed with your newest products or with a “sale item of the week”? The possibilities are endless, but remember your customers have to want to receive your feed, so make it interesting and worth subscribing to.
How can my website create an RSS feed?
Luckily there are tons of online companies who specialize in turning your website content into RSS feeds. Here are just a few, and none of them require any special coding or html language from you:
Enabling your website with RSS means more visibility for your website and a better chance of retaining your customers’ interest long-term. If used to its full potential, RSS can be a powerful SEO strategy. It doesn’t take much time or effort to set up and the rewards can be amazing. The online seed retailer Burpee recently reported a four-time increase in sales after adding RSS feeds to their website content. The same could hold for your company - but you won’t know until you give it a try!
Tags: boosting traffic, Carrie Hinkel, E-Commerce and E-Business, Marketing, RSS, SEO tools
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Sources of Content for Your Website
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
You have a website and you’re generating some traffic and some interest, but you’re reading about how to improve traffic and have been given advice to put some keyword articles on your site. How hard can it be to write an article or two of 500 words? You can get that done in an evening.
Suddenly, before you know it, you meet with your advisor again and he/she asks about the keyword articles you have on your business plan. Oops, they weren’t that easy to get done. Your advisor mentions outsourcing or buying into a content service that will provide articles, which sounds like a good idea.
There are basically 3 ways to get content for your website. Write your own, have someone else write it for you, or buy software that will generate articles.
Article-Generating Software
Buying software that writes articles of quality is next to impossible. While there is software that will generate rewrites of articles, to get quality content you will need to do a considerable amount of editing. You will spend enough time that you may as well write your own articles instead.
Writing Your Own Articles
Writing your own material is a good idea if you like to write and enjoy the topics you have on your site. The chances are pretty good you like the topic, because you have a web site about that topic. If you are good at writing, you certainly can save yourself some money; but at what cost?
If you could spend the time creating more orders, more advertising revenue, or developing a new market wouldn’t that time be better spent on that than on writing content? The answer to that really depends on how much getting quality content costs, which brings us to point # 3.
Hiring Freelance Writers
There are several sites that help you find content for your web page. Two of the most popular are freelance sites Elance.com and Guru.com. On these sites, are able to list your content-writing project for free. You can list the topics, article titles if you wish, even the length and keywords to be used in the documents.
Qualified writers then bid on your project and usually attach writing samples for you to view to see their style. The process certainly isn’t perfect, but it is possible to get quality articles at a fair price.
If you are looking to increase your web traffic, you will want to get articles that are Search Engine Optimized (SEO), which means they use keywords and related words to trigger the search engines to bring up the site they refer to. For example, if you have a coffee business and want to increase your web traffic, you would want articles with the word coffee used about 12-15 times in a 100 word articles. Additionally, words such as espresso, coffee maker, creamer, sugar and other words related to coffee in the article would help to trigger the search engine.
Good quality content can be hard to find, so when you find a writer who is good make sure you pay a fair price, pay on time, and keep them happy. Good content will point search engines your way - resulting in more sales, more profits, and more good things for your business.
Tags: boosting traffic, E-Commerce and E-Business, incresing website traffic, larry Slusser, online content marketing, SEO tools
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