Greatson Media – Saco, Biddeford Maine Website Design & Hosting

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t easy for any website, and e-commerce sites have some unique SEO challenges to overcome.
These tips will help you tackle your e-commerce site’s SEO so you can rank higher in search engine results and get more visitors, customers and sales for your online store.

1. Create Unique Content on Each of Your Product and Product Category Pages

Interesting, unique content tells Google a page is valuable, and helps it rank higher. Well-written content can also persuade more of your visitors to actually pull out their credít cards.

Don’t just copy the manufacturer’s description of the product. Write your own description so that Google sees it as valuable, unique content. Google’s Farmer/Panda Update of early 2011 favors sites with more original content.

2. Discover What Shoppers are Actually Searching For

Keyword research is an invaluable way to discover the words you should be using to describe what you sell. You can find out how many people search for a particular keyword per month, and even check more specifically for your own region, with Google’s free keyword tool.

3. Create Pages for Categories People are Searching For

Some people may be searching for specific product names like “Nikon D90,” but odds are, more people are searching for broad keyword phrases like “Nikon digital camera” and “digital SLR cameras.”

Creating category pages for these broad keyword phrases – as well as product-specific pages within each category – boosts your SEO and helps you capture a bigger number of people searching for what you sell. Added bonus: Category pages based on broad keywords can help browsers and researchers find what they want more quickly, and turn them into buyers.

4. Interlink Your Pages Using Good Anchor Text

Link to other products or categories within the text on your site. Be sure to use anchor text with relevant keywords. This will help search engines find and index other pages on your site, so they can be found by searchers. The links and anchor text will also boost the linked pages’ SEO and help them rank higher for words you use in your anchor text.

Added bonus: People reading your text can easily click on links you provide and find other products that might interest them. You’ll be keeping people on your site, and helping them find what they want.

5. Allow People to Share Your Products on Social Media Sites

Social media mentions help your SEO. Plus, social sharing gets your product seen by more people. Install social sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ on every product and product category page. Make sure they’re easy to find. One online retailer places them right below the price of each product, because people always look for the price.

6. Get Valuable Backlinks

Backlinks (links from another site to yours) have always been one of the most important factors search engines consider when deciding how high to rank a web page in search results. Getting backlinks isn’t easy, however.

Adding interesting content to your website beyond product and category pages is the first step, because few website owners want to link to a boring page, or a page where you’re just selling something. A blog is a great avenue for adding link-worthy content to your website.

7. Avoid Duplicate Content Issues

E-commerce sites tend to give visitors the option to sort a list of products by various parameters like price, popularity or product ratings. While sorting is useful for people, it can be a nightmare for your SEO, because it usually means you are essentially creating multiple pages with the same content, just in a different order. Search engines can see these pages as duplicate content, and therefore less valuable. This in turn can dilute the SEO of these pages.

8. Use Descriptive URLs

The URLs on your site are another opportuníty to boost your e-commerce site’s SEO. If your page about blue widgets has a URL like http://www.example.com/blue-widgets, the URL is telling Google that the page is about “blue widgets” and should show up in search results for that keyword phrase. However, if the URL is http://www.example.com/page?id=59274974, Google doesn’t get that extra piece of information telling it what the page is about. People also look at URLs, and it’s much better if the URL informs them, too.

9. Let Visitors Leave Reviews

Reviews are another piece of unique content, and search engines love unique content.

Plus, reviews can help visitors decide to pull out their bank cards and purchase the product.

By Kristina Weis (c) 2012

Learning to turn your website visitors into buyers is a skill that every internet marketer should acquire. Do you have a website or a blog you are promoting? Are you satisfied with the behavior of the people who visit your website? Do they come and disappear without accomplishing the desired actions you expect them to perform such as filling in a form, buying a product or signing up for the program you promote? How much time do they spend when they visit your site?

If your responses to the above questions are in line with your expectations, then you are probably one of the lucky few website owners or marketers with the skill and ability to turn your website visitors into buyers. But if you still find hardships in this, like many other marketers, it’s high time you tested the following tips for improvement.

How do you then turn your website visitors into buyers? Before going into the details, bear in mind that your success in making a sale online will largely depend on your ability to create a reason for your visitors to hang around your website, to keep visiting your site frequently and to perform the actions you expect them to do. There are many ways of doing this, but let me share with you 11 proven ways. When you apply them properly, I believe you will be able to turn your website visitors into buyers slowly but consistently.

1. Having the right product for your targeted visitors. Review your product. Does the product you provide, meet the individual needs of your specific traffic? If it doesn’t, consider coming up with an alternative way of meeting your customers’ needs and satisfaction.

2. How is your website in terms of loading time, appearance, content organization and easiness to navigate? Are your visitors put off just because your website loads slowly and its appearance does not give them a positive first-hand impression? Is it because of the poor navigational and broken links? Find out and do something to it as soon as possible.

3. Credibility: Do visitors to your website have trust in your products and in you the business owner? How have you built your credibility? Probably it’s one of the reasons stopping your visitors from taking any further action. Trust protects you and can easily turn your website visitors into buyers.

Continue reading “11 Proven Ways to Turn Your Website Visitors Into Buyers” »

On April 12, 2011, Senators John Kerry (D-Mass) and John McCain (R-Ariz) announced proposed legislation that could become the first federal privacy and data security law. If passed into law, The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights will have a huge impact on how personal information is collected, used, and shared by eCommerce websites. And penalties for failure to comply could be high, very high.

The Way It Was – And Still Is

A little background information is required for perspective.

Prior to 2000, the Internet was essentially like the “wild wild west” in terms of privacy and data security. Essentially, there was no regulation. Generally speaking, except in California, privacy issues were not high on the radar screens of government regulators.

In 2000, California became the first state to have an agency dedicated to promoting and protecting the privacy rights of consumers. In 2003, California passed the California Privacy Protection Act of 2003 (OPPA), which was the first state law in the nation regulating operators of commercial websites on online services to post a privacy policy. OPPA in essence became a de facto federal statute because it applied to any person or company in the United States (and conceivably the world), and no commercial website would want to attempt to screen out California residents from participation in its services or the purchase of its products.

When OPPA became law, there was no federal privacy legislation of general application. The Bush administration essentially wanted to stay out of the way of the commercial development of the Internet.

Despite the lack of a federal statute of general application (which continues to this day), the feds did get involved with online privacy enforcement through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Empowered by The Federal Trade Commission Act, the FTC may take legal actions to prevent unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.

Beginning in 2000, the FTC issued a report to Congress outlining four core principles of privacy protection. Since then, the FTC has taken action against companies that fail to comply with their own privacy policies or otherwise misrepresent their information management practices.

So, although the requirement for a privacy policy originated with California’s OPPA, the feds, through the FTC, are empowered to act if a website is deceptive in failing to comply with its privacy policy.

Key Provisions of the Proposed Law

If The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act becomes law, this will change – in a big way. For the first time, we’ll have a federal privacy statute of general application.

So, what’s new with the proposed law? Here are some of the key points:

* Covered entities - any site that collects, uses, transfers, or stores “covered information” about more than 5,000 individuals during any consecutive 12-month period.

* “Covered Information” - personally identifiable information and any unique persistent identifier associated with an individual or networked device that may be used to identify a specific individual.

* Rights to security and accountability - included is “privacy by design” which requires the implementation of a comprehensive privacy program that incorporates privacy practices throughout the product life cycle.

* Rights to transparent notice and individual participation - notice includes clear, concise, and timely notices of privacy practices; opt–out mechanisms for (i) specific uses of covered information, and (ii) use of covered information by third parties for behavioral advertising; opt–in mechanisms for (i) use of covered information for uses other than processing a transaction, and (ii) use or transfer of previously collected covered information if there is a material change in privacy practices that would create a risk of physical harm; access to covered information; and de-identification of covered information when individual service terminates.

* Use of service providers - covered entities that use service providers are required to enter into a contract with the service provider to treat covered information as private and secure in accordance with the new statute.

* Collection of information - limited to collection of only as much information as is reasonably necessary to process a transaction or request, prevent fraud, investigate a crime or comply with a law, market using the information collected directly, conduct research and development to improve service, or for surveys of website analytics.

* Retention of covered information - retention is authorized only as long as needed to process a transaction or deliver a service, conduct research and development, or comply with the law.

* Distribution of information - transfers of any information to a third party are authorized only if covered entity performs due diligence indicating that the third party is reliable and the third party enters into a contract to use the information consistent with the new statute; combination of the information by the third party with other information is prohibited unless opt–in consent has been given.

* Enforcement - enforcement would be permitted by the FTC and state attorneys general; there would be no private of action.

* Penalties - civil penalties up to $16,500 per day for affected individuals, with a cap of $3 million for violating the security and accountability provisions, and a cap of $3 million for violating the notice and individual participation provisions.

Conclusion

If passed as proposed, The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights will have a huge impact on covered ecommerce websites. The cost to comply will be substantial. Penalties for non-compliance are potentially devastating.

The proposed law would not only affect a website’s policies for collection, use, and sharing of personal information, but they would also affect the design of websites, the design and structure of customer and prospect databases, and how websites actually function and operate.

By Chip Cooper (c) 2011 (attorney)