6 On-Page SEO Tips For Online Merchants
If you run an online web store and are concerned that your SEO might not be up to snuff, never fear. You can always improve your SEO and here are 6 on-page ways that you can give your SEO content a boost. All of these are easy to implement and will produce positive results for your onsite SEO.
- Descriptive URLs – Let’s start with the URL. Instead of using dynamic URLs, use descriptive URLs that utilize your best keyword phrase for each content page. Your product name, a product description, or a phrase that best identifies each individual product is best for your product description pages.
- Create Unique Content For Every Product – Every product page should have unique content, and I’ll add that each should have at least 250 words of content. If necessary, combine several like products on one page and give each one a unique description. Is there really that much of a difference between a blue widget and a yellow widget? Do they need separate pages? If so, make sure you provide enough content on each page that you give them maximum SEO value, and that means no duplicate content.
- Use Category Pages – People don’t just shop for individual products. They also search for categories of product. If you sell cameras, have a section for digital cameras. Have another for camcorders. Make sure each category page has unique content.
- Link Your Pages Together With Anchor Text – Link your pages together with appropriate anchor text. This alone can give your website a huge boost. Figure out the best internal linking strategy based on consumer buying habits, keyword phrase associations, and complimentary products.
- Allow User Reviews – Every time you add new content to a page, the search engines return to crawl that page. When they do, they also re-index and re-rank it. Allowing user reviews, even negative reviews, can give your product pages a huge boost in the search engines.
- Allow Social Media Sharing – Social media sharing can encourage your content to travel far and wide. That means more potential traffic, more potential product reviews, and better SEO overall.
Each of these specific on-page content solutions has at least one associated SEO benefit. If you want to improve your online shop’s SEO, try these on-page content tricks.
Why Keywords Are Not Out Of Fashion
Every once in a while I read a blog post or hear some SEO somewhere, or a social media marketer, start proclaiming that SEO is dead or keywords are useless. But I notice that they have pretty well optimized web pages themselves.
The question comes to mind, What are their motives?
Maybe they’re trying to create a ruse to throw other SEOs off track and stop optimizing their web pages. Or maybe they’re sincere and misguided. Or maybe they just have some brilliant insight into the future direction of SEO. Whatever the case, I’m pretty sure they’re wrong about keywords. They are not useless nor are they out of fashion.
Keyword stuffing is useless. Keyword density is WAY out of fashion. But keyword-optimized web pages are still very much en vogue.
The search engines still return results for search queries that match keyword-optimized on-page content. As long as they do, keywords will still serve a purpose. But managing your keywords in a way that search engines will reward them is paramount. Otherwise, you may not rank as you think you should or you may find yourself at odds with search engine policies. Both scenarios are bad.
Don’t listen to the naysayers who say that SEO is dead or keywords are useless. Maybe some day they will be, but that day is not today.
On Page Vs. Off Page SEO: Which Is More Important?
There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.
On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.
A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.
Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?
There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.
Two Branches Of SEO
There are two branches of SEO that every website owner should be familiar with. There’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Your on-page SEO consists of keyword management, meta tags, alt tags, navigation, and other elements that exist on your page to help you produce effective SEO for your website. Off-page SEO consists of anything you do off of your website, such as building links, that produces SEO benefits.
One of the best things you can do off page is to list your website in directories. Many webmasters don’t know it, but you can submit your internal web pages to deep link directories and build links to those internal pages.
Neither on-page SEO or off-page SEO is more important. On-page SEO, of course, must come first. And it should really be your focus in the early days of website development. But after your website is built you’ll need to focus on link building and off-page SEO.
Are Backlinks As Important As On-Page SEO?
The argument continues – are backlinks more important or is on-page SEO more important? There is a growing number of SEO professionals who believe that backlinks are the holy grail of SEO. But most of us still chant that content is king. Which is it?
Personally, I think backlinks aren’t important at all until you have some on-page SEO working in your favor. What’s the point to building links to a page with no content? Even if you succeed in boosting that page’s rankings, visitors to the page will be disappointed to find nothing there. But a well optimized web page that answers a question for a lot of people within a particular niche is a gem, with or without backlinks.
Don’t get me wrong. You’d be a fool to build a web page today with no link building plan. But I’m simply illustrating the importance of quality on-page SEO. That’s the starting point. Everything else, from there, is upward mobility.