7 Quick tips for eCommerce SEO

The importance of the website ranking is quite known. Every website wants to rank higher in the Google search rankings. It provides a better coverage to the website and at the same time, the chances of getting explored by the users are also improved. According to a survey, the top 3 ranked sites of the Google search extract a total of 70% of the traffic. Hence, the importance of getting high in the search results is quite important. To get close to that mark most of the website try various methods and opt for outside help.

The SEO are the first thing that the website look out for. Whether the website is in its initial phase or has been put up for improvement, the SEO provides takes care of every aspect of the website to optimize it for better output. The optimization done by using the eCommerce SEO services helps the store to get better output and at the same time make the web store look better. The customers are also benefited from the optimization process and the interaction between the customers and the online store is well maintained.

Let us study the various areas where the eCommerce website SEO helps to make better conversions.

1. Keywords research

The search for any product by a customer is made on the basis of keywords. It is important for the web stores to earn the importance of keywords. In order to become, the top priority of the customers, the online stores need to be at the first page of the Google search which is only possible by making use of the relevant keywords. The eCommerce store must try to highly figure out what keywords best relate to their products. The web store must prevent the usage of the keywords that are not related to the products on the web store as it gives a rise to bounce rates.

2. Competitor keywords

Another thing to look out when selecting keywords would be the competitor keywords. In case the competitor is a well-established brand than the eCommerce store must refrain themselves from using the same keywords as their competitor is using. It will result in diversion of a larger traffic to that store. Thus, choosing the keywords which has a better impact to direct the customers to your web store must be given the priority.

3. Website structure

Another aspect of gaining better traffic to the web store would be by providing the website with better structure. In order to make sure how to get a better site structure, the eCommerce store can refer to some of the well-established websites and look at their way of presenting the products to the customers. It would be an advised thing to categorize your products depending upon multiple factors. The better understanding of the products by the customers proves to be an effective tool in making better sales. Therefore, the website must try to present a better insight of the services provided in simple way.

4. Site errors

The website might be facing a difficult time due to the errors that existed in the website. In order to make sure that the customers are always provided with results and should not face any difficulty. Moreover, the small errors in the website also give a tough time to the customers. These errors lead to the lost interest of the customers and the customers prefer to move on to other sites for purchase. The top errors you will want to correct quickly include redirecting any 404 pages to actual content, changing 302 redirects to 301 redirects, updating duplicate content pages, meta titles, and meta descriptions.

5. Website performance

It has been estimated that with a delay of 1s in website response the conversion rate are lowered by 7%. Thus, it becomes an important area of concern for the online store owners. Visitors doesn’t like to hang around the website waiting for the response. If it takes more than 3 seconds for your website to load, you can increase the speed by buying more server space, using a different CMS. The fast response from the website ensures the customers that they can deal with their purchase instantly and exit the web store easily.

6. Mobile response

The usage of mobile has considerably increased in the past few years. It has been analyzed that almost more than half of the customers use their mobile phones to browse the sites. 31% of mobile Internet users “mostly” go online using their phones (Pew, 2012), 61% of customers who visit a mobile unfriendly site are likely to go to a competitor’s site (IAB), 58% of mobile users expect mobile sites to load as quickly or faster than desktop sites (Google, 2011). Therefore, it is highly recommended for the web store owners to optimize their mobile website as the website mostly use the duplicate content for their mobile website which creates a SEO problem in rankings.

7. Customer reviews

The usage of placing the customer reviews on the product page has seen to be an effective way of attracting better traffic. The conversion rate can be improved by 14-77% by just adding the reviews. In addition to increasing conversions, customer reviews also positively impact your SEO because more reviews result in more content and frequent reviews produces fresh content, which Google loves to see. Thus, the reviews not only makes the customer’s decision of making a purchase on the product but at the same time also helps in ranking up the website in Google rankings.

Over to You

The small details that are made use by the SEO for optimizing the web store are helpful can drive the much-needed traffic. The proper implementation of these SEO techniques will surely help the online store to grow and make better conversions.

Are You Optimizing For Google Image Search Results?

We have been making enormous efforts in improving the SEO for web search results on Google search engine. We have also been applying the same intensity of efforts on Google Voice search results. But, there is really a lesser segment that really cares about the Google Image search results. 

It has been so underutilized without knowing that Google image search is the second most used search platform after the Google web search or so called Google.com. That say’s an article on Moz.com. 

Are you really taking images seriously?

The image searches on Google Image is more than that of the search queries that are performed on any of the top websites like YouTube, Google Maps, Amazon, and also the Facebook. This information clearly means that Google image search shares a huge proportion of overall searches on the internet. However, knowingly or unknowingly, we often make mistakes with the images that we use and thus lose the visibility on this massive search platform.

How we post images and what mistakes we make?

Wrong Names:  People posting the images often overlook to optimize the images to show on the Image search results. They give some really unique names to their images which no searcher will use in the query. They give the names like "IMG_000023", "Image_1", "IMG_Edited_0012" etc. The probability of any user searching on the internet or Google image search with these strings is nearly zero. This means the image will never show up in the search result at least for the keywords wasted in naming it wrongly. And even if the image comes up in any random search result, it is due to the extra information feed (If given) like Caption, description etc. in Image SEO.

Unrealistic image file names can put you at a disadvantage in image SEO.

Wrong Keywords:  Some uploaders use the wrong names or random phrases in the image name, not even relevant to the image. Putting keywords not relevant to the image will push your image to show in the irrelevant search results. So, despite your image get listed on the top, it will hardly get a click.  Below is an example of an image labeled with the wrong keyword that made it appear in a search query for Smart-watches. Would a person searching for a Smartphone image click on it?

Irrelevant keywords can make your images end up in an irrelevant search result.

Stock photos:  Stock photos can be used in various events. However, overuse will make your search image listing unauthentic and unrealistic. Especially in the cases where you put an image to say something about you or your business. For example, the below image screen shot was taken for a search made for "Lawyers in Delhi". The circled images are stock photos which you might have seen many a time on different websites. They do not appeal you to click on them. Hence, Google will eventually lower the ranking of these images. 

Stock images don’t provide the kind of authenticity and authority your image needs to have.

Overly sized:  Large sized images take a longer time to load. You can't expect the users to wait for more than 2-3 seconds. Reducing the file size will considerably reduce the page loading time, but that does not mean you need to compromise with the image quality. There are various free online programs that can be used to cut short the unnecessary data and reduce the file size without losing the image quality. Use these tools to compress the file size and reduce the page loading time. 

Wrong image ratios:  It's important to post the images in a standard expected ratio such as 16:9, 4:3. Google in the search results view, uses the thumbnail views reduced to a small size. In the case of using the images in the non-standard ratios, Google will automatically resize the image to fit the standard ratio frame. Due to this resizing, the image thumbnail might loose the focus and valuable details might get omitted.

What should you do for better indexing and ranking with images?

Google doesn't see the images as it reads the textual contents. So the meta-data, labels, and descriptions provided with the images become crucial for indexing by the Google image search. Google uses this data to identify the images and their context of usage. 

The more easily and deeply the images are indexed, the more is the chances for better ranking in the search results. The following listed details are the main content that you should provide while uploading the images:

File name

As explained above, the file name is a fundamental and crucial entry that can give a context to your image. Never use irrelevant and unrealistic (IMG_00023) file names for your images. You should leverage this entry and provide a more appropriate file name that defines the image and its context. You can use your main keyword relevant to the image in the file name. 

ALT tags

ALT tags or Alternate Texts are the HTML tags that are used with the images to show up in case the image does not load or rendered properly. For example, in a browser where images have been disabled, the ALT tag will show up in place of the images. Also, if your image takes a longer time to load, till the image gets loaded, the ALT text will show up. 

This makes sure the search engines do not feel fishy about your images even if they are not rendered properly. Moreover, it will also give the user an idea of the image till it gets loaded completely on the browser. 

Captions

Captions are simply the text that appears with the image on the browser. Captions will always show up. They are generally shown just below the image. You must provide the captions to describe the context of the image to the users.

Captions provide the contextual meaning to the images.

Description

Descriptions allow you to put an explanation of the image by providing additional details like links, keywords, and context. They are generally used by the search engines to read the context of the image. They show up in the search results when an image is listed in the SERPs.

Descriptions help the search engines to read your images and their context more easily.

Contextual information

In addition to the meta information, keywords, and description, Google utilize various other supporting contents and information to rank the images. The contextual information can be the page content, Page URL, other images around it, the image site map, Page title etc. You should keep these optimized to render a unified, relevant, consistent and related context of the image. 

Summing up

Images have always been an important element on the web. Though Google cannot index the images like the textual contents, it still uses the supporting texts to identify and judge the context of the images. It's really important to understand the role of images in SEO and do not overlook them as something less important. 

Optimize your images everywhere you use them; Articles, product pages, landing pages etc. A proper SEO of images will also ensure the better performance of the contents related to them. Moreover, they can promote your brand, store, products or services in the search results as well. It's time to invest the deserving time on images and unlock the uncharted potentials that you overlook now.

Http Status Codes To Know From SEO And Development Perspective

HTTP status code or call them HTTP response status codes, they are returned to the browser to inform it about a web page or resource it requested from the server. When a browser or a search engine makes a request to the server, it responds to the request with a status code. Now the code it returns depends on the status of the resource or request.

If the request is served successfully by the server, the response status code will return 200. Similarly, there are other response codes as well. All these codes play a great role in both the website design & development and SEO of your website.

Knowing these status codes is very important for the website developers and designers. Skills to read these code will help them identify an error on the page and do the needful to fix it. Moreover, even the SEO professionals should also be familiar with the response code, as some of these are really crucial from the SEO point of view.

So, it’s undoubtedly an important thing to know about your website. So, let just understand them and improve the knowledge base. At least, next time when you see any such code, you can easily identify that error and ask the website development team to look into it.

HTTP Response Status Code Groups

The HTTP status codes are formally divided into 5 groups

100s: Progress- Request received and in process

200s: Successful- Request received and processed successfully.

300s: Redirects- Request received but a redirection required to serve the resource.

400s: Browser errors- Also referred as client errors. The request made by the client, but the page is not valid.

500s: Server errors- Server failed to complete the request

HTTP Response Status Codes- SEO perspective

While there are many more codes in these groups, there are abundant that are important from the SEO point of view. Let’s understand these codes in detail.

200 OK response code

This HTTP response code means the request has been served successfully by the server. Generally, it means no error in the request or from the server side.

301 Moved Permanently

This HTTP response status code is often used by the webmasters from the SEO perspective. It means that the requested resource is not available on current URL. The user must use one of the returned URLs to get the desired resource. In Simple terms, the page your are visiting have been permanently shifted to a new URL, Please use this new URL to visit the particular page from now onwards.

PS: When you move to a new URL and apply 302 redirects on it, It carries forward the SEO of your old URL to the new URL. That is, it does not kill your SEO. 301 redirect is often used in the creation of SEO-friendly URLs.

Read: How To Enable Seo Friendly URLs On Opencart 2.x?

302 Found/ Moved Temporarily

 

This response status code is returned in a similar condition as of 301 but on a temporary basis. It means the page you are requesting for has been moved to a different URL, but you need not use the new URL for future requests as this is just a temporary redirection.

PS: 302 redirection is not a recommended approach. Unlike 301 redirects, it does not carry forward your SEO to the new URL. Pages redirected with 302 codes are not ranked well on the search engines.

404 File Not Found

This is an error code which means that the requested resource was not found on the server. This can happen anytime when the server fails to find a requested page on the site.

A site with too many 404 errors is always seen by the search engines with that doubtful look. This affects the SEO as well. To handle this, webmasters often create a separate page with text written 404 error on it and redirect all the 404 pages to this particular page. In this way, the actual response code received will be now 200 OK but it will show as 404 on the page.

There are some nice solutions given here on this stack overflow discussion thread for Redirecting 404 error with .htaccess via 301 for SEO.

410 Gone

This HTTP response status code means that the requested resource in no longer there on the URL you are looking at and there is no redirection to any new URL to find the resource.

This code is a bit similar to 404. When server knows that the resource is no more available and it's not going to be available in the future as well on this URL, then it gives the 410 Gone response code.

However, when the server does not know if the missing resource will ever be available on this requested URL, then it gives the 404 response.

500 Internal Server Error

When something goes wrong on the server. It's a server side error that has to be fixed on the server. This could be temporary or even permanent till it is fixed.

502 Bad Gateway

When a server communicates with another server, and if the other server fails to respond successfully, then the first server sends this 502 error code to the client/browser.

503 Service Unavailable

When this response code shows on your browser, it means that the server is currently unable to serve the request due to a temporary failure. Generally due to overloading. It generally means that server has gone unresponsive for a temporary period of time.  For example, when the server has to be put down for a short time for maintenance purposes, it's a 503 condition.

Over to you

So, these are some HTTP response status codes which you generally see while browsing the internet or diagnosing your website. Now that you have an understanding of what these error codes mean, you should run the HTTP Response Status Codes Check for your website and find out if there are any error codes. If there is any, ask your web developer to look into it. You should also ask your SEO service provider to keep a track of such error codes, and also check if the redirection has been used correctly.

A mobile friendly website and its Search Engine Optimization

With the Google's growing emphasis on mobile friendly websites, marketing professionals are more concerned about making their website mobile friendly. Although, it has not been officially announced but it is a buzz that Google's new algorithm is considering mobile friendliness as an important criteria for ranking of web pages into its search results. In fact it has been seen that about 40% of internet users are mobile users only. It doesn’t matter whether Google considers mobile friendliness as a parameter or not but due to growing numbers of mobile users, it is clear that web masters have to take the path of mobile friendliness if they want their site to be seen by a large population.

What is a mobile friendly website? 

A mobile friendly website improves online search rankings and customer attention.

A mobile friendly website is a kind of website which has been optimized to provide a complete viewing experience of websites on mobile devices without any hassle i.e. being able to view a content properly without any need to zoom it. Here, websites are designed in such a way that they can serve both the mobile as well as desktop users. Some of the components of an effective mobile friendly sites are as follows:

- Users don't have to scroll horizontally in order to browse the complete view of the site. 
- Links are arranged in such a way that there is enough space between the links so that they can be easily clicked.  
- Avoid unnecessary plugins and flash-player which slows down the mobile web page loading.
- Use HTML and CSS for better designing and faster viewing experience. 
- Utilize a good site map which is understandable by Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.

What can you do to improve ranking of your mobile site?

Mobile SEO is the technique employed in order to improve your site ranking on the mobile search results. Mobile SEO or Mobile Search Engine Optimization makes your site easily understandable by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and such others.

Steps to improve your site ranking: 

1. Make it mobile friendly

Making your site mobile friendly is a complex job to do but once you do it, half of the SEO is done automatically. You can make your site mobile friendly by applying any of the three methods mentioned below:

a) Responsive Approach 

When you make your site responsive, Google understands it properly and there is no need to apply any extra code. You just have to apply the view port code given by Google on your website. It automatically adjusts the size of the window according to the screen size of the device.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

No doubt, you have to do some extra coding in addition to this code. This code is used only for optimizing the screen size but it is also important that you optimize the content and other components in the frame.

Cross device compatibility improves chances of more conversions and product sales.

b)  Dynamic serving Approach

Here, a webmaster designs separate pages for desktop and mobile respectively. When using the dynamic approach, you are serving the pages according to the type of device requesting the site. For this, you have to inform Google that you are using separate pages for both the platforms from the same URL. If you do not inform Google then it might think that you are serving some irrelevant data in the particular URL and your ranking might get affected.

Note: User-Agent code is utilized in the header tag in order to tell Google that site might look different in mobile and desktop browsers.

c) Using Separate URLs 

One can use separate URLs for desktop and mobile sites. For example, www.domain.com for desktop users and www.m.domain.com for mobile users. But this can create a confusion for Google as it will not detect automatically that you are using separate URLs for different platforms. One has to inform Google about this particular scenario.

On the desktop version of the page, add a link
rel=”alternate” tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This will help Google bot to discover the location of your site’s mobile version.

On the mobile version of the page, add a link
rel=”canonical” tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.

2. Inform Google 

Once your site is mobile friendly, you have to inform Google that you are mobile now. You need to submit your site to Google. However, optimize your site map properly before submitting it to Google. It is better to submit each and every URL or page so that Google can understand it in a much better way.

3. Optimize the content

The contents of the pages are very important for SEO point of view. Each page should be designed to be mobile friendly and should be provided with proper meta tags and description. Avoid keywords stuffing as you can’t make a fool of search engines. Moreover, this illegitimate use of keywords will ultimately degrade your ranking.

You need to optimize the loading time of your page. Google considers the loading time of a page for ranking purpose. The page load time need to be optimized by avoiding plugins and flash players as they are designed for desktop versions specifically. Apart from this, other helpful tips for mobile speed optimization are mentioned below:

- Avoid pop ups in mobile versions as it can frustrate the user.
- Do not use unnecessary mobile redirects as it can increase the load time of your web page.
- Do not block CSS, JavaScript or images using robots.txt as it might affect your ranking because blocking them interferes with the indexing of the site on Google.

Following the above steps can make your website adaptable to various cross platform devices. You can increase your conversion rates by focusing on the need of various cross platform users. Once, you are having a quick loading mobile site, you can effortlessly grab more conversions and sales for your business.

How to boost your Business Performance with Keyword Researching?

Focus on keyword researching and targeting for optimum business results.

With the rapid growth of the internet among people, numerous business entities are working to bring their services to a global platform for providing a seamless access to their products or services. The world of internet is full of endless business possibilities and can help you achieve significant growth and conversion rates in a particular business segment. Search engines are playing a bigger role in spreading the information and word about your business entity in the online interconnected world. If your business information features in the top search engine result pages (SERPs), more number of people will be aware about your company which will in turn improve your chances of growth and business expansion. Keyword Researching and targeting is still one of the important criteria that defines the online presence of a company on various search engines. If you are still ignorant about its impact, let us provide you a quick insight about the same.

1. Impact of consumer Research- When people browse for a product/service or any information, they are usually unaware about the exact place or location where that required information can be found. To make searching on various search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, they use various terms or statements that together make up the list of search keywords like long tail keywords, LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords and other such data. By having information about all these keyword terms, business entities can understand the mindset and behavior of their consumers about what they are looking for. This small exercise can go a long way for improving your search engine optimization efforts for the growth of your business. Apart from this, there are tools like Google Keyword Planner that can help in deciding the right keywords for your business.

2. Navigation and taxonomy research- In order to bring more customers towards your business, you need to find out ways to make the optimum use of keyword specific data of your visitors. You can make use of customer's interest and purchasing behavior for providing effective navigational links on your site content. If you can provide a seamless path to your users from your site to the desired location, people will love to engage with your site again and again for business engagements. Better linking of your site pages increases the link authority of your site and will improve the online rankings on various search engines.

3. Optimization of site content- It is the need of the hour to have an engaging content on your site for better customer attention and sales. You need to develop your content in such a way that can effortlessly bring your targeted customers towards your store for higher conversion rates. Analyze the online browsing behavior of your visitors to have a clear information about the most popular keywords that can be used in site content like internal web pages, blogs, articles and other such writings. Effective researching and targeting of your keywords can make your content more appealing and is considered as one of the strongest pillars by numerous SEO services around the world. Velocity is one such name that specializes in the on- page and off page optimization services for ensuring higher conversions and sales.

Don't neglect the keyword researching as it has the ability to affect your key performance metrics like site traffic, conversion rates, sales, customer engagement and other such factors. Keywords can boost the online rankings of your business to a great extent and can shape its destiny among your rivals. For making the most out of your keyword researching and targeting efforts, you need to avail the unmatched SEO services of our company, Velocity by giving us a call on this number +1 (424) 653-6907 or mailing us at inquiry@velsof.com. So, engage with us and rule in the search results of various search engines.