Best Practices For Ranking Your Online Store At Top

This is not a hidden fact that your Ecommerce store can be easily displayed at organic search list of popular browsers like Google or Bing. Most important factors of making your site rank higher are to show authority with your contents and backlinks; ease of crawling and show relevance with your keywords which you target. But in this matter, one thing should be kept in mind that for highly competitive searches to display your sites with them is not a matter of joke and couple of hours. For gaining quick results please resort to PPC or ‘Paid Per Click’ format of advertisement because you have to be patient with SEO.

If you want to explore the second option, SEO can really pay off in a great way. This is because traffic generated through organic searches are free of cost and surveys made by MarketingCharts has confirmed that 39% of its merchant customers are realized through this search.

In this article, we shall cover all of the associated checklists and hope that if you follow them religiously your site will rise up in organic search ranks.

Webmaster Tools

• Creating an XML sitemap file and submitting it at your browsers via accounts created through your Webmaster tools is a necessary method for indexing your site.
• Webmaster tools should be efficiently utilized for searching any duplicate content, 404/500 errors or any errors related to crawling. While going through them if you find a single error try to fix it as soon as possible.

Keyword Research

• For determining the highest search volume for your keywords you can use Google’s Keyword Planner which will help you to receive biggest ideas for your keywords. Thus you can easily try to rank them in future. What search terms do you put for finding your products? Which search terms are put in by your customers?

Page Optimizations

• Make sure that only a single H1 tag is being used in your pages. H1 tags include the subject line of your pages and generally comprise keywords that have biggest search volume.
• Make it sure that H1 tag is used before all other tags like H2, H3 or H4. Maintain the hierarchy.
• Make it sure to keep your subject line within a boundary of 70 characters so that it’s not wrapped in results.
• Make sure to make human-readable and quality page titles. Try to keep in keywords in the title but don’t over-optimize it.
• Meta-descriptions should be within 150 characters. This text appears under page title in search result. See that it includes all keywords but again don’t over optimize it.
• Your page url should include a keyword.
• Make it sure that image alt tags and filenames include descriptive terms.
• Make it sure to not include underscores in urls and use dashes very rare.

Backlinks

• It is good to build a strategy for link building. This will give you more links from other websites. Google weighs this as your website’s authority factor. For your chosen keywords, Google rank them higher with more numbers of backlinks from other websites.
• Compare your competitors’ backlinks and for this use tools like Open Link Profiler to find out which companies are linking back to the pages of your competitors. Reach out to them and try to receive their links at your web pages. Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer are tools which can be used to check out your competitors optimized websites, their domain authority plus their present status.
• Getting links from press is a good method to land your store at other sites.

Content

• This is a good practice to build a content strategy. How to use your quality content focusing upon the keywords is a talent. Post them on a regular basis.
• Make sure that all of your web pages have a minimum of 250 words of quality, descriptive contents.
• Blog posts and informational posts should have a minimum of 500 words.
• Please avoid duplicate contents. Survey made by Search Engine Journal says that those stores which regularly publish blogs have 434% higher indexed pages.
• Add unique product descriptions.
• This is a good practice to add product reviews on your pages.
• Related pages of products now obsolete or you no longer sell should be redirected and if you don’t know where to redirect them then simply redirect them to your homepage.

Reputation Building

• Try to build your business at popular social media platforms like Twitter, FaceBook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
• Try to make your business profiles at review sites and those which allow you properly manage your reputation. Some of these sites are Amazon, TrustPilot, FourSquare, Google Business, Epinions and Yelp.

Some Other Factors

• Make your site responsive for making it mobile friendly.
• Make sure your site loads fast.
• Take help from official SEO practices accepted by Google, when in doubt.

Final Thoughts

Once you follow this checklist gradually your Ecommerce store starts to get higher ranks. If your brand is new please be patient with the results.

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