When marketing your e-shop, one thing you will immeadiately come across (probably already have) is search engine optimization(SEO). The act of optimizing your website for better search engine ranking and visibility. There are a lot of articles on the web on SEO, some complicated, some technical, some more myth than fact. Here I will share my experiences and tips.

Today, when people talk about search engines, the first thing that comes to mind is Google. Google is by far the biggest searhc engine today, it is approzimated that Google has more 70% share in total search engine activity. You will after some checking find that most, if not all visitors that come to your site trough search engines, come from Google. The tips I share here apply the best to Google, and that should be sufficient for most.

Do not let technical details get in the way

Everyday, people at Google work on making their search engine better, working on a search engine that finds what people are looking for. Their focus is to bring content that people are looking for, not a page full of keywords, descriptions and tags. They work on algorithms that identify the context of the page, identify tricks people use to lure the search engine etc. They focus on useful content, and so should you.

You can adjust every little piece of code your page, fix every meta tag with the most due diligence, but at the end of the day what matters most is your content. If you want to get a good ranking on Google, write content that people would want to read. Whatever products you are selling, you can write articles about them and publish them on your website, on CMS pages. You can install a free blog, keep up to date content and put links to your products and shop. You can publish these are articles on other websites on occasion, and get quality liks.

At the end of the day, good ranking relies on good content. Write good articles and place it in your site the most accessible way you can. It not only helps you get a good ranking, but it is also a great marketing tool. People like to make informed decisions, the articles they read help them make these decisions. By sharing your knowledge on the particular niche of your site, you also influence your customers.

Make a website that people like to explore, and you will get a good search engine ranking.

Position your content well

Google has algorithms that identify the position of content on your site. A good and creative design can help you convince your customers, but you should also make an effort to have a consistent layout troughout the site, and do not deviate too much from it.

The content that you want to sell, should be easy to locate, easy to see  and easy to read.

Quality Incoming Links

An important factor in determining your search ranking is the links to your site from other sites on the web. The important thing here is the quality of such links, you might even get penalized for having links from certain sites. The better ranking a website has, the better the links from that site are. There are a lot of people on the web who promise generating incoming links, do not go for it. Do your own link building or ask someone you trust to help you.

Tools

Before you do any optimizations, you should first analyze your customer base and your existing shop. The first tool you should familiarize yourself with is Google insights (or trends).

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Google insights let's you check how a particular keyword is doing over time. Is it getting more popular? Less? How is it affected by related news? What is the latest trend? etc.

For your particular niche, you should already be able to come up with keywords. With Google insights you can track how are they doing. You can compare different keywords and identify current trends by country. This will help you to choose what to focus on. Onc you know what keywords people are interested.

Once you know what keywords people are interested in the most, you can write articles related to those topics. The important thing here is not to get carried away. The articles you write should still be original, not repeats of the same keywords over and over again and informative.

Another great tool is Google webmaster tools. You can signup and start using here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Usage is pretty simple. You should add your domain twice, www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com. You have to verify the ownership of these two as two separate domains. You can then select a preferred domain. This makes search results and links more consistent with each other, and makes it known to the search engine that these two are the same website.

There are quite a few useful tools in Google webmaster tools. Here you can see which search queries display your site, which queries resulted in clicks, which keywords appear the most on your site, the incoming links to your site etc. You can set a target country for your site, which will improve your rank for that country, add parameter for the engine to ignore and check any problems Google found with your site content.

Don't worry if you don't see much information at the beginning. It might take more than a month for Google to start indexing your site, and a few months before you get reliable data.

Another tool to track your progress is Google analytics:

https://www.google.com/analytics/

This is more complicated to use because it requires you to add some code to your site. Most e-commerce applications come with modules that already handle this.

With Google analytics you can track your visitors, it comes with an arry of tools to help you see what works and what does not. You can create goals -basically a target URL and a series of pages that lead to it, and see how your visitors reach that target URL, like the order confirmation page. You can see where your users leave the process as well. Figuring out why your customer leave your site, you can work on keeping them.

Here you can track two important traffic sources, referring sites and search engines. It also let's you see which keywords lead to your site and how many visits.

I hope this article was helpful. Feel free to share your experience or ask questions in the comments. Anonymous commenting is handled trough Facebook.