Practicing Good Merchant Website SEO
Most business owners know by know that the Internet isn’t going away, and if you want to succeed in business you need to have an online presence. Having a website is only the start, however. Without good merchant website SEO, chances are that the business website will never rank high enough in the search engines to make it worthwhile. Good search engine optimization practices can help stack the deck so even small business owners will have the ability to have their sites compete with the big boys.
Formatting for ideal on page SEO
The way an article or web page is formatted on the site can make a big difference when it comes to ranking in the search engines. One of the worst kept secrets is that Google has hired human quality readers, and formatting a webpage to be well organized and easy to read makes a big difference now when it comes to ranking well for keywords.
This means several things for how a website owner needs to design how their page looks. Informational pages need to include plenty of subheadings, bullet points, lists, and short paragraphs. Think “reader friendly.” Pages should be easy to scan and never appear as block paragraphs.
When looking at a retail page that’s mostly products, merchant website SEO work can be a little bit more challenging. It’s a good idea to stay away from iframes, which lead to outgoing link saturation and also isn’t the best way to present a large number of products. All products should have varied descriptions to add in as much relevant and original text as possible.
Carefully using keywords
Keywords remain a very important aspect of SEO for any website. The key is to walk that fine line between making sure to use enough keywords and a good variety of related keywords versus not using too many. While the numbers vary from one expert to another, it’s generally agreed that it’s not good to go above 2% of text on any page being one keyword.
The other important way that keywords on a page of text can help increase rankings is where they appear. The main keyword the site owner wants to rank for should be located in the title of the page or article. In the text itself that means a well optimized page will have the keyword in the first paragraph, often in the very first sentence. One or two variations of that keyword phrase should be used in the middle of the text and then once again in the last paragraph.
Do backlinks still matter?
One of the strongest ways to boost website rankings is still to get backlinks from related websites. Good merchant site SEO means finding specialty blogs or related sites that might naturally link to the site. There is some controversy with the practice of backlinking because intentionally manipulating backlinks can result in the website actually losing rank.
The best way to boost SEO with backlinks is to offer a good guest blog post to a related site. Give them some quality writing, and link back just using your URL or the actual name of the website. Doing this keeps it legitimate, gives an SEO boost to the merchant site, and helps avoid any search engine ranking penalties.
