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Advertising and Search Engine Optimization |
SEO: Links to Success
Search engine optimization aims to boost the traffic and revenue of eCommerce websites without the use of inefficient and costly advertising such as pay-per-click schemes, of which there are several. It is recognised as the best method of boosting online sales. The reason for this is simple; the web is saturated with adverts and generally web users will avoid them as much as possible. It is organic (free) search engine results which people have come to trust because search engine results deliver the most relevant sites rather than just trying to sell a certain company's products. As discussed in the article 'Linking: What Makes the Web the Web', building links is a major part of the process of organically improving search engine rankings using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Advertising: When Revenue Costs
The temptation to place adverts on your eCommerce site and enter into affiliate schemes can be hard to overcome. It offers a quick form of gaining revenue to help start getting a return on the website which you've invested in. Caution is most definitely advised. The way that an eCommerce website makes money is by getting as much valuable traffic to visit as possible. SEO is by far the best way of doing this and here arises the conflict. By putting adverts on your page in a way that distracts the user from the actual content and services offered by the site you are actively discouraging other sites from linking to your site. This is where the internet differs from television and radio. Though advertising has been woven into the fabric of these media, it is accepted because the user is getting something for free in the form of the entertainment provided. Online, however, there will almost always be a site which has the information within your content without advertisements. Plus, if you're selling goods, people simply don't want the distraction; it makes them far less likely to make purchases on your site and dramatically decreases repeat-purchase figures.
eCommerce: Learn From the Best
The evidence for these statements is freely available for all to see. Take a look at sites such as amazon and ebay. These sites have huge amounts of daily traffic so advertising might seem as if its going to make them large amounts of revenue. But they are ad-free. The reason for this? Usability and encouraging customers to make purchases is far more important than short term benefits of advertising revenue. Combined with the benifits to SEO efforts of excluding adverts, and the fact that any eCommerce website will be competing with at least one ad-free website and it soon becomes clear that in eCommerce, for many businesses, advertising just don't pay.
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Linking: What Makes the Web the Web |
Linking, SEO, eCommerce and You (Oh, and some money)
Linking is one of the fundamental ideas behind the world wide web. By having a vast collection of data which one can surf through using links, the way in which people store, present and find information has been revolutionised. Now, if you were actually to try to use just links to navigate around the web, finding a website could take days. Try it for yourself; get from bbc.co.uk to ebay.com using just links (i.e. no searching). Had fun for the last hour or two? Good. For this reason, links are now secondary to search engines; if you want to find information quickly then a search engine is what you use.
Linking is Dead, Long Live Linking
So, if we don't use links to find websites anymore, why are they so important? It's down to the way search engines rank websites. To a search engine, links are still the basis of the internet. If a website has hundreds or even thousands of other websites linking to it then there is a fair chance that that website is important, relevant and a good resource to direct people to. If all of those links relate to a certain keyphrase, say 'Holidays in Italy' then it's a pretty safe bet that when someone types 'Holidays in Italy' into a search engine, this is exactly the kind of site which they want to see.
Links and SEO
As those acquainted with search engine optimisation will know, it is the method of organically improving search engine rankings . From the above, it should be pretty clear that building links is one of the key aspects of SEO. It is only by bulding links from authoritative, well ranked sites that search engines will begin to place importance on an eCommerce website. This is a time-consuming task, key phrases must be targeted within links and the links must be relevant, otherwise their value to a search engine is dramatically reduced. For example, if the links to the site about holidays in Italy all came from pages about UK car insurance firms, the site won't rank very highly regadless of the number of links compared to a site linked to by, say, the Italian tourist board's website and an Italian wine review site. Any eCommerce site which wants to make an impact on search engine rankings needs to employ SEO and as part of that process should be building quaility links.
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White Hat and Black Hat Search Engine Optimization |
Search Engine Optimization: the Magic of eCommerce Success
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of organically improving search engine rankings and it really can have magical effects for eCommerce sales figures as it drives high vaue customers to eCommerce websites in large numbers. It does this by making websites appeal to the algorithms used by search engines such as Google to rank websites. As anyone who has been searching the web for a number of years will have noticed, regardless of technical knowledge, the experience of searching has gotten substantially quicker and easier over time. This is because search engines and their algorithms have gotten more sophisticated and now are much more likely to return useful results.
The Dark Side of SEO
SEO can be split into two broad categories: White hat and Black hat. Black hat SEO techniques are those which work by tricking the search engines into thinking that the content of a website relates to searches when, in fact, certain features have merely been built into the site to make this appear to be the case. It used to be that this could be accomplished by putting keywords of the same colour as the background (and therefore invisible to users) all over the page and similarly basic techniques. Search engines have put a stop to most such techniques working. This means that Black hat SEO is now used to make a website rank highly for a couple of weeks or even days before it is blacklisted by the search engines. For spammers who can easily creates tens or hundreds of sites a day, this short term effect is enough to eek out a living.
Step Into the eCommerce Light
White hat search engine optimization is the only way to improve search engine rankings and keep those rankings high. White hat SEO techniques are those which make it obvious to search engines that the content of a website really is important and relevant to people's searches. White hat SEO is closely linked to the idea of accessibility and is the only real option for a legitimate eCommerce website . At this point you may well be asking yourself why Black hat practitioners don't just use White hat techniques if they really are the best method of generating traffic. The answer is simple: it is far easier to create a hundred websites wth Black hat SEO than it is to create a single successful eCommerce website using White hat SEO. White hat SEO is a long, labour-intensive process; it can take weeks or months before the full effects of SEO are seen and traffic and revenue figures reach their maximum. But there's the payoff: by investing in a White hat search engine optimization service like that which Parallel Thinking Europe provides, an eCommece website can enjoy vastly increased traffic and revenue permanently as long as SEO is maintained.
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