When merchants talk about ecommerce conversion, it usually centers on design, button placement and ease of checkout. The process, though, actually starts the second someone lands on any web page. This is why textual content is so important.

Here are eight rules for using text on your ecommerce site that eliminate confusion, welcome your new visitors and otherwise answer all questions about your products.

1. Don't Assume Customers Understand Your Products

Product descriptions and supporting pages–like Frequently Asked Questions and customer service details–are highly important. Not only does word choice help define rankings in search engines, it can help teach visitors about products and how to use them. Oft-used terms are always new to someone. Many new Internet users still post on sites asking what LOL (Laughing Out Loud) means.

2. Define Acronyms and Initialisms

Assuming that everyone knows what these types of abbreviations mean can increase frustration amongst those not-in-the-know. Even if the visitor has heard the term repeatedly, he may not know what it actually means. An acronym uses the first letter of each word in a term or company name, but is pronounced as a word (e.g. ROM for "Read-Only Memory"). An initialism also uses the first letter of each word, but each letter is pronounced on it's own (e.g. FAQ).

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) | Kick it! | DZone it! | del.icio.us | ReTweet

As an established high street name, your customers need to be in a position where they can easily find your name at the top of search results. For this reason, you need to have an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy in place. Here are some tips to stay ahead of the game:

Brainstorm your brand’s keywords: This is the first thing your team needs to do during SEO, but don’t fall into the trap of considering “brand” terms first. Instead, try to get inside the mind of your average customer – generally speaking the terms and phrases they use are unbranded long-tail terms. These are what shoppers will be typing into search boxes, so should take precedence during the branding process.

Optimise technical aspects of your site: This can easily improve its crawlability, which is usually achieved through page tags, site maps, internal linking, coding practices, media usage and URL structure. In doing this however, bear in mind that search engines do not index all the pages they crawl, and do not crawl all the pages they know about. XML and deep HTML sitemaps provide the best chances to get as many valuable pages indexed as possible.

Take full advantage of Universal Search: This is one of the biggest online marketing tools at your disposal today. In layman’s terms, universal search is a search strategy that goes beyond simple text and produces everything from tagged videos to maps and shopping results. This could be a particularly powerful tool in, for example, the apparel sector, where images and video are often a deciding factor in whether or not a customer purchases.

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) | Kick it! | DZone it! | del.icio.us | ReTweet

Since SEO is constantly changing, how can SEOs determine the most important areas of focus? As Matt Bailey of SiteLogic Marketing tells WebProNews, the foundation has to be strong in order to be built upon.  For this reason, he believes the fundamentals are critical to SEO success.

Content is just one of the fundamental areas of SEO. Not only is the content itself important, but the structure of the content is also important. Bailey says content needs to be scalable, readable, and allow users to understand the content on the rest of the page by simply looking at the headline. This is significant because numerous studies show that the majority of people scan content instead of reading it.

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) | Kick it! | DZone it! | del.icio.us | ReTweet

It is widely accepted that SEO has evolved from simplistic initiatives such as keyword density and frequency within a page of content. Search algorithms are continually evolving to understand context and attitudes based on advanced semantic analysis.

That said, understanding the target keywords of a given web page will always remain a key focus for SEO development. The main principal remains; each page should have a clear and unique theme.

When briefed on SEO strategy, content creators frequently ask for a methodology by which they can identify the target keyword for a given page. To this end, over time I have constructed a five point checklist that can be deployed to help determine the target keyword for a given webpage. Each method can be used together or in isolation. They are designed as a guide rather than a strict process.

1. Empathise with the user. In my opinion this is the most simple but valuable stage of the keyword identification process. Anticipating the potential search terms that could be used in order to accomplish the task that the web page sets out to achieve is a fairly rudimentary practice. Nevertheless, it is advisable to benchmark these assumptions using the following methods.

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) | Kick it! | DZone it! | del.icio.us | ReTweet

If you search on the internet for information on the use of meta tags in SEO you will come across numerous websites stressing how important it is to get your meta tags right, how many words and characters to use etc.

But is it really that important?

For Google's web search results, the answer is no.

Here is what Matt Cuts from Google Search Quality Team has to say:

Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that's an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword meta tags completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present.
 

Cross posted from WSI Internet Marketing UK

Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) | Kick it! | DZone it! | del.icio.us | ReTweet