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As the industry is changing as rapidly as Google tweaks their algorithm, it is hard to decide what the most important factors are. The On-site and off-site are the two major factors in SEO which is necessary for every type of website. Normally, most of the webmasters starts with the on-site SEO, because your aim is to get your website recognize by Google. If they don’t, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword?

The search engine spiders that crawl your E-commerce website will be looking at several different attributes on every page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google search engine.

Another factor worth mentioning is a Keyword. What is a Keyword?

A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your E-commerce website. I am using a Bodhost.co.uk website as an example. People could search for “Web Hosting”, but they might also search for “Cheap Web Hosting”, “VPS Web Hosting” and “UK Web Hosting Service”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases.

However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note that almost all On-site SEO has to do with is placing high-quality keywords throughout your E-commerce website content where search engine robots, spiders, or software might be able to decide what your website is about.

6 On-Site SEO Factors That Can Influence Your SERP Ranking:

• The Title of the Page
• The keywords used in the text on your website
• The keywords are used in H1 Tags
• Keywords used in your domain name
• Keywords used in the URL of a webpage
• Meta Keywords

3 Major Off-Site SEO Factors That Can Improve Your Search Engine Ranking:

Backlinks to Your E-commerce Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a UK Web Hosting, and you provide that service, they may link to your website with “UK Web Hosting” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Bodhost’s official website or something along those lines.

The Age of Your E-commerce Website

The reason I listed this as an off-site related issue, because it really doesn’t fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks.

I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. As compare to Google, Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this.

Posted under e-Commerce, SEO Tips

Sitemaps are well-known to most of the people as many websites put their sitemaps on their homepage. But, that who doesn’t know, a sitemap is a web page which contains a list of all the links or pages of a website under different categories and headings, same as an index of a book. Sitemap can be a great tool for making search engines crawl through your web site in a much more effective manner, in that ways helping you get more web pages indexed, and ultimately getting you more visitors. Particularly, when a search engine visits the site map page it gets to see all the links within that website and this enables it to crawl through those pages.

Sitemaps also help visitors to get a summary of the whole web site, and hence it is also a great navigational tool. It helps visitors find specific pages through a single page, for which they might have had to follow several links to reach the desired page. Below are some examples of well designed site maps.

http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

http://www.lycos.com/sitemap.asp

This leads us to the next question, i.e. how should site maps be designed. Designing a sitemap can be as simple as designing any other static pages without any pictures, graphics, etc. But all effort should be made to keep the structure logical and simple. It’s best to browse through the web, and check out a variety of sitemaps before you decide on what kind of structure you want to follow.

Important things you should keep in mind, before creating a site map.

Homepage Link: It is important to give a prominent link from the homepage to the sitemap page, so that visitors and search bots can easily hit the site map page. In fact, preferably there should be a link to the site map page from every page of your website.

Text Links: Plain text links should be used for all the links, as some search bots can have problems crawling through JavaScript.

Categories: It is important to organize the contents into well defined categories, and even sub-categories for easy navigation of the user. Although this doesn’t have direct SEO implications, it makes more sense to the user.

Descriptive Content: It is ideal to add some content describing the links, as search engines tend to ignore pages, full of links. It is also important to use your targeted keywords in your descriptive content as well as in your anchor text.

Anchor Text Link: It is important to use page titles as your anchor text, so that you can increase your anchor text back links. This is helpful for search engine optimization as it increases your link popularity.

However, websites with less than 20 pages or sites where most or all the pages have links directly from the home page generally don’t need a sitemap. Consider the above things before designing a sitemap; add a little effort and you’ll have a well-designed sitemap for the search engine spiders that will keep them happy and satisfied and that will help you get good ranking.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization