LotusJump Blog

For many e-commerce companies (including us!) it can be difficult and extremely frustrating trying to rank on the first page of Google for our targeted keywords. SEO can take time (months, even years) depending on how fierce the competition is, as well as many other factors that determine where exactly a site will rank in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To help increase the odds in how favorably Google lists our site, here are some SEO techniques (from the SEO experts) that you should consider doing:

1) Content - Make sure the homepage of your website has content (not just images or flash) that contains your targeted keyword(s). Aim to have at least 500 words of unique content, preferably more. Be sure not to keyword spam in the content and a good rule of thumb is to use keywords (and keyword variations) between 1-2% of the total content. Here’s an example to help clarify: If you have 500 words of content on your homepage, don’t use your keywords (and keyword variations) more than 5-10 times.

2) Title Tags - The title tags are very important when it comes to having Google determine what your website and content are all about. It’s extremely criticalto use your most valued keyword(s) in your title tags. A good rule of thumb to follow is to only use your top 2-3 keywords on your homepage title tags. Anything more may be considered spammy and could dilute any link juice allocated towards the keyword rankings. We also recommend that each page of your website have different title tags, and that the title tags relate to the content written. (For those of you who aren’t sure what the title tags are, look at the very top of your computer screen and examine the words written on the dark blue bar - those are your title tags)

3) Article Tasks - The article and content tasks listed in your LotusJump SEO software accounts are the most important tasks - so don’t ignore those! Freshly written articles that are unique and catchy not only help improve your overall SEO keyword rankings, they can also drive direct traffic to your site, especially if the article goes viral. The easiest way to capture a large audience of readers for your articles  is to write about something that is either funny, helpful, controversial, or causes fear, while relating to your product or services. Sure sex sells, but it can also be quite distracting to readers since it won’t relate to the product or service at hand.

4) Link Exchanges - If you have business partners who own websites, it would be a good idea to ask them to link to your website, preferably with 1 of your keywords as anchor text. This can provide a nice boost to your keyword rankings, especially if they provide a link to you on the homepage of their site. You can offer to do the same for them to help increase their likelihood of doing so.

5) Blog - If your business still doesn’t have a company blog, now would be a good time to get one. By creating a company blog, you can generate a new source of traffic and easily direct them to your company’s website. The nice thing about this type of online traffic is that it should be highly qualified, which should translate into higher conversion rates. Aside from providing an additional stream of visitors, blogs can also help improve keyword rankings through fresh content and imbedding links throughout the content.

* If anyone has their own suggestions or methods for improving keywords rankings, feel free to share them in the comments.

LotusJump user Greg Witt recently asked a great question about optimizing his Swiss Alps tours website:

“As I’ve been doing my Lotusjump SEO, I’ve noticed Google’s SearchWiki that allows me to customize search results and make my SearchWiki notes available to other users.

Is there a way to use this feature as an SEO tool? Could I conceivably boost my site’s ranking by my responses?”

For those that aren’t familiar with Google’s SearchWiki, here’s a summary of the feature from the NY Times,

[Google] is introducing a new feature called SearchWiki that will allow people to modify and save their results for specific Google searches. They can move the sites that appear in rankings up or down, take them out altogether, leave notes next to specific sites and suggest new sites that are not already in the results (or are buried too far down in the results to see). Users must be logged in to Google to use SearchWiki and can revisit their annotations when they perform the same search later.

So back to Greg’s question…can you leverage SearchWiki to boost rankings? Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search product and user experience said, “At this time we aren’t using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future.”

The fact that she even hinted at the possibility of SearchWiki influencing ranking leaves me with no doubt that it someday will. If you think about it, Google is aggregating some really valuable data with SearchWiki–actual human opinion. If their goal is to return the most relevant results for a given search term, why wouldn’t they take the average Google user’s opinion into consideration? This is the “human touch” that the mathmatic algorithm has always lacked. So I have no doubt this data will make it into the algorithm at some point–how soon, and to what degree, only Google knows.

So what now? I wouldn’t go overboard, but I’d give my honest opinion of search results in my niche, and encourage friends and clients to do so also. Be responsible and consider Karma.

But if this data someday becomes a factor, it will be nice to know that you have contributed your 2 cents.

The following 5 Steps explain how to create your own optimized subpage for a keyword of your choice.

Step 1: Choose your keyword phrase
Determine a keyword phrase that your target audience would consistently search to find the products/services offered on your website.

Step 2: Create a page for your selected keyword phrase
Have your webmaster create a new page with your existing website theme. Make sure it has any necessary calls-to-action.

Step 3: Make sure that it’s optimized for your keyword phrase
To do this, you’ll want to make sure that your keyword phrase is found in most, or all, of the following places:

• In the URL String (i.e. www.yoursite.com/your-keyword-phrase)
• In the Title Tag of the page
• In the Meta Description of the page
• In the Meta Keywords of the page
• In the Copy on the page, multiple times where appropriate
• In Bold, where appropriate
• In the Alt Tag of relevant images on the page

(A more in-depth look at these factors will be treated in next week’s post, “on-page optimization tips“.)

Step 4: Link to the optimized page from your homepage
This will pass some of the existing authority of your homepage to your newly-created, optimized page.

Step 5: Build links to the optimized page
This step is crucial to get maximum results from your efforts. It also happens to be the most difficult. Luckily, this is where the LotusJump SEO Software provides its most significant value. LotusJump simplifies the off-page optimization process by aggregating customized linkbuilding tasks and dropping them directly into your personalized account, complete with tips and instructions. No software makes linkbuilding more effective or efficient than LotusJump.

Want your website to become a top online resource for a certain keyword phrase?

Try building a page on your website specifically for it!

An optimized landing page is a tried and true PPC principle, but not many people have recognized its value for organic SEO as well. If you know that a certain keyword will drive traffic to your site, why not give that keyword its very own page? To illustrate the point, let’s imagine you’re a search engine trying to return the most relevant result for the search term “safe baby crib,” which would you pick–Result A, B or C?

Result A:

URL: www.cribs-r-us.com
Title Tag: Cribs R Us, Online Baby Crib Store, Largest Baby Crib Selection
Meta Description: “Your online resource for the largest selection of baby cribs!”
Opening sentence: “Welcome to Cribs R Us - Browse our huge inventory of different kinds of baby cribs”

Result B:

URL: www.crib-factory.com/baby-cribs
Title Tag: Browse our Cribs - Cute Baby Cribs, Safe Baby Cribs, Sturdy Baby Cribs
Meta Description: “We offer many kinds of cribs–cute baby cribs, safe baby cribs, etc”
Opening sentence: “View the images below to learn about our many types of baby cribs.”

Result C:

URL: www.cribs-r-us.com/safe-baby-crib
Title Tag: Safe Baby Crib, Safety Crib | Cribs R Us
Meta Description: “Consider our safe baby crib product line for your infant’s needs”
Opening sentence: “Sleep well knowing you’ve purchased one of the following safe baby cribs from Cribs-R-Us.com”

If you were picking the result based on on-page SEO factors alone, Option C would be chosen as the most relevant result due to the prominence (not density, mind you) of the keyword phrase on the page. Check back for next week’s post on how to create your own optimized subpage.

Now that you’ve analyzed search volume, check out the competition for your search terms first hand. Type each of your search phrases into Google and look at the first ten results. The following characteristics make your competitors more difficult to unseat:

1) The age of their domain

In other words, how long ago the domain was registered. Find out by typing their domain into a WhoIs search. Older domains are generally more authoritative

2) The number of backlinks they have

Sign up for a Yahoo account and use their Site Explorer tool to check the number of inlinks to the site (inlinks=backlinks). The more inlinks the more competitive.

3) The quality of backlinks they have

When you examine their inlinks in Yahoo’s site explorer tool, look at some of the top ones—are they from authoritative .gov or .edu sites? Are they from other authoritative .com sites? Authoritative backlinks make your competitors more authoritative as well.

4) Their Google PageRank

Download the Google toolbar to see each website’s PageRank. PageRank is a score of 1-10 assigned to each website that has been indexed by Google (1 being the least authoritative, 10 being the most). Higher PageRank = a more competitive site.