5 SEO Tips for Retail Websites

An online retail store contains products from various or niche manufacturers. A retail website can sell anything from toys, books, furniture, bags or perfumes. The best example of a retail website is Amazon, which lets you purchase almost anything under the sun. In order to generate leads, you need to drive quality traffic to the website. Search engine optimization is the most commonly used technique to drive traffic to the website. It is also the technique many webmasters are ignorant about. If misused, your website can get banned in the search engines.

Five SEO Tips for Retail Websites

1. Target Niche Keywords: Quality traffic is defined as the visitors who are genuinely interested in the websites content. You can draw quality visitors to the website by targeting niche keywords. Lack of knowledge about SEO can be detrimental to this basic step of search engine optimization. Your target should be to analyze keywords from your niche and select the ones which are a perfect blend of competitiveness and popularity. Fiercely competitive keywords take over a year to rank. Thus, you should work on ranking well for several long tail keywords.
2. Generate SEO Friendly URL’s: A retail website is bound to contain several hundred pages. With addition of various products, this number is going to increase. A Dynamic website is developed using a programming language whose URLs contain session ids. This kind of URL structure is not SEO friendly as the searchbots ignore them. Do not use special characters in the website URL except hyphen. Also, keep the URL structure common throughout the website.
3. Add Fresh Content: Search engines love websites which get updated regularly. Webmasters have a good scope of adding a variety of non repetitive content to the retail websites. Content can be added in the form of product description, comparison with other products and consumer reviews. You need to ensure that the content doesn’t get repeated in the website. Do not stuff the content with keywords. A keyword should be distributed in the content 3-4 times at relevant places. Always write for the visitor and not for the search engines.
4. Optimize the Images: Image optimization if a part of the on page optimization strategy. A retail website is full of product images which the search engine cannot read. You can use the alt attribute in the image tag and input relevant text. For e.g., if the product image consists of a Harry Potter book, the alt tag can read, Harry Potter- the Sorcerer’s Stone. Instead of reading a blank space, the search engines will encounter the above text. With thousands of images, image optimization is absolutely necessary for a retail website.
5. Optimize PDF Files: It is common practice on a retail website to offer a product catalogue in the PDF format. If optimized well, a PDF file can rank faster than an html page. An image based PDF file is like an image to the search engines, who don’t read them. In order to rank well in search engines, text based PDF creators are more useful than the Image based PDF creators. You should always fill the document properties of a PDF file, especially the title. Lastly, keep the size of the PDF file to the minimum. This will ensure quick loading of the file.

All the SEO techniques applicable to a normal website can be used for a retail website. This includes off page optimization activities like link building and search engine marketing. A well optimized retail website not only increases the ROI but also enhances the user experience.

@Gagliassoblog

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Facebook Moving Forward With Now 600 Million Users

Facebook’s advertising measurement tools have for a long time understated its demographics; however it appears that the site just hit the 600 million user mark.

Facebook added 100 mill users in just under 6 months, and of these users over one fifth of them were from the United States, which still remains the largest-represented country on face book.

Asia has also had growth since mid June last year, namely India, the Philippines and Indonesia Both Philippines & Indonesia are in the top 5 among countries represented on this site, but they also have a fraction of the number of users than in the United States.

However we are far more curious about whether this current fast pace of growth will continue, and if it does then for how long?

Can it move as fast as to say Facebook could reach 650 million users in March and 700 million in June this coming year? Growth in the United States is expected to calm down sometime in the near future and then the rest of the expansion will have to come from the other countries around the world. The very few of countries that face book hasn’t yet impacted seem to be the “swing votes” in concluding whether or not the current trajectory will continue?

@Seoconsult

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What is Link Wheel Strategy?

Link wheels are nothing but a group of websites that are interconnected which try to improve the ranking of a target website by linking to target website.

Following pictorial diagram will help for understanding link wheel:

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Social Media Play Bigger Part in SEO Link Building

Social media sites are becoming a big part of search engine optimization (SEO).

Sites like Facebook and Twitter can go a long way when it comes to link building strategies. With the help of these social networking sites, SEO campaigns can conduct more efficient marketing campaigns and targeted e-mail campaigns.

Of course, content promotions are still the best way to build links. But they can be reinforced by social media campaigns to increase effectiveness.

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7 Ways Social Media Will Change Your Business Forever

Social media is one of the most powerful new marketing tools for business. In fact it is safe to say that if your business is not taken advantage of social media, then your business may get left behind in the dust. The proliferation of social media into our daily lives has exploded in 2009. Every day reveals a new form of social media from our phones to new social networks appearing on the Internet.

Some may argue social media today is chaotic with so many apps, widgets, countless features, and tools all fighting for a piece of the social media pie. However, like almost everything in business, there are key fundamentals that you’d need to address to give yourself a competitive edge in business.

The truth is the social media is continuously evolving. While many others try to keep up with these ever-changing factors, the savvy business owner should be creating a powerful social media presence that covers the essential areas of social media and creates a solid foundation for future growth.

1. It’s All About The People And Communications: Social media is just that, social. Just as social media is creeping into business it is a much more rapid accepted by your target market that is continuously bombarded by this new media. As such, you need to make sure you have a solid presence on such social media platforms as Facebook and Twitter. Ideally, these starting networks will provide time to adjust and grow your social media exposure and provide a solid starting point to grow from. Social media is about connection and communication. The true globalization and amalgamation of social media behavior has opened up a large door of opportunity for businesses that are forward thinking enough to take advantage of the situation.
2. The Perception Of Value And Trust: One of the key advantages of social media is that it breaks down the barriers that separate business from customer While many businesses hide behind this war as some sort of protection. Smart entrepreneurs take down that war and allow the target market to see behind the value. By doing so they create a warm rapport and build trust with their target market. Essentially, they are putting on a human face to their company and by developing closer connections to their customer base, they can increase sales and ultimately grow their profits using this medium.
3. Connectivity, Convergence and Productivity: One of the major problems for businesses starting to social media is the fact that everything is so disconnected. For example, if you release a new article or blog post, it can take a while to manually post these two-faced book, twitter, or wherever else you are aggregating your information to. Thankfully, there are many ways to integrate and connect all the social media services into one funnel. Using services like Ping.fm you can post to one service, which then feeds your post to your many other social networks. Ping.fm for example supports over 40 different social media platforms. Believe me, this can be a major timesaver and can still help you get your message out to every single social network you may be involved with.
4. The True Application Of Social Media: If you know anything about Facebook, you will know that Facebook apps are one of the primary ways that Facebook uses interact and get hooked on using the service. If you have a Facebook presence for your business, one area of social media you should consider is getting your own application built. You don’t have to have any programming or technical knowledge, as you can outsource this very easily. However, this can take some out of pocket startup capital to get going, but once it does it’s incredibly viral and powerful marketing tool for your business. Ideally, think of something to related to your business or target market that is fun and entertaining. Creating these apps is actually very simple to do and for some larger businesses that have taken this route, it has been incredibly lucrative.
5. Creating a True Network and Community: As mentioned earlier, some business is high time the wall that separates the business from the customers. This wall really does create a barrier to communication and customer involvement as well as loyalty to your business. By taking advantage of social media and creating an actual network between all of the social networks that you are involved with, you can actually create a viral community that actually helps to promote your business. So make sure that in each social network you promote your other networks and openly invite your customers to join the other networks to stay informed.
6. The Evolution Of Social Media Advertising: One thing you’ll find in social media is a lot of people advertising incorrectly. Twitter at is a great example of this. I see too many people sending out nothing but links trying to sell their products or services. However, any marketing expert will tell you that this is business suicide. In social media, direct advertising is often frowned upon because of the nature of social behavior. The savvy social media enhanced business owner will quickly realize that the soft sell approach works infinitely better than trying to communicate a powerful sales message in only 140 characters. By building a reputation of value and trust, as well as creating a solid rapport with your target market, you’ll have a much greater chance to convert the website visitors you will generate for your social media activities into an actual paying customers. That is not to say that cannot to use “Hooks” to draw interest into your promotions, that is just common sense. However, blatant hard sells will ultimately tarnish your reputation and damage any long-term prospects.
7. Making Money – The Main Reason For Your Social Media Presence: For most people, social media is about being social and connecting with other like-minded people. For a business, our goal is to make money. It is our sole reason for existing. Often times it is hard for a business to break the social media bubble and resistance to business efforts. Unfortunately, among many social media purists, there is a common perception that all business should be banned from social media.

Of course, that is not only unrealistic but impractical. However, by taking the correct approach to social media by being personable and putting a human face on your business you have a much greater chance of creating a solid and profitable traffic and revenue stream in the long-term. Most businesses do this by branding the person rather than the business. For example, a lot of top CEOs and executives of companies are the “front man” for their businesses in terms of social media.

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