Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
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As an internet marketing strategy, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) looks at how search engines work and what people search for. In other words, SEO is intended to make your company’s website more “search engine friendly”, a term that is used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.
Anyone whose business relies on its web site for marketing and sales wants to be in the "top ten" search results, because most users will find a result they like in the top ten. Being listed beyond the top ten results may mean that many prospective customers will miss your ecommerce site. This is why search engine optimization is so important.
Search engine optimization is the process of taking a web page built by humans and making it easily consumable for other humans as well as for search engines such as Google. These search engines use “spiders” or “crawlers” to visit a web page and read it, then follow links to other pages within the site. Whatever the crawler finds is “indexed”, which is how your website is included in search results. To better understand this concept, think about how you search for anything using your favorite search engine. Almost instantly, the search engine will sort through the millions of pages it knows about and deliver sites that potentially match your topic. The matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first. That is the result of “crawling” and “indexing”.
Optimizing your ecommerce website may involve editing some website content and perhaps adding or modifying HTML coding through a WYSIWYG editor to increase the likelihood the search engines will find you. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site and site content, SEO tactics should be incorporated into website planning, development and design. If your website is already up and running, however, don’t despair. The crawlers will return to the site on a regular basis to look for changes. So if you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines will eventually find these changes.
A key concept in SEO ranking involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic. Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. A search engine will also look at how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages. Target keywords should always be at least two or more words long. Build your titles around the top two or three phrases that you would like the page to be found for, thinking of them like headlines for your pages. They appear in search engine listings, and a short, attractive title – or headline – may help encourage users to click through to your site.
When you choose the Rapid Marketplace ecommerce solution, our team of experts will get to work to be sure they fully understand your business needs, and then translate those needs into a fully-integrated website strategy designed to deliver optimal results for your business.
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