This chapter covers online shop web page optimization corresponding to SEO (Search engine optimization) requirements and how to increase prominence within search results. Several things determine the effectiveness of SEO (that is, how to ensure that your web page would be easy to find on the Internet); nevertheless there are not many basic principles of SEO. It is possible to achieve good results by using just a few simple techniques.
The topics covered in this chapter are:
- Title tags
- Keyword selection
- Page content and description
- Anchor text
- Some extensions for SEO
By the end of this chapter, you should know how to structure content and modify web page source for powerful SEO results.
As important as it is to create a visually attractive web page with all the necessary functions that allow finding information about the company—in our case, where to buy berries—it is important to take some steps so that the online shop can be found on the Internet.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an important activity to make a web page effective and profitable (to be indexed in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, among others). Sometimes SEO is called searching optimization, but this is still just a series of steps that result in an optimized web page being shown higher on the search result list when searching for specific keywords, such as "berries sale", "buy currants", or "berries wholesale".
The fundamental principle of optimizing a web page is smartly choosing the web page structure (menus, and sub-links, as well as the general structure of the page) in the early stages of development. It is important to note that the successful technical development of the page alone does not ensure a high number of visits for your online shop. The following aspects are essential for the successful indexing of a web page—these will affect the presence of your web page on the Internet:
- The incoming links from other websites—it is recommended that the linked web pages are from a similar industry
- Categorizing—this is the optimal solution for building the basic navigation of a web page
- The context of the content (the density and the consistency of topics)—that is, a page containing one topic rather than, say, four topics will be indexed more successfully
Google is currently the most popular search engine. This is also one of the most visited web pages in the world. The address for the international page of Google is www.google.com.
Most likely, the potential visitors of an online shop will use Google to search for information about goods available in your shop. It is necessary to know the basic principles of SEO and the use of those principles so that your online shop can easily be found according to its characteristic keywords.
Professionally implemented SEO requires relatively large amounts of financial resources and time. Sometimes the cost of such optimization exceeds the cost of traditional advertising. Nevertheless, SEO is a long term investment; it can effectively ensure that a web page is among the top 10-50 Google search results for several years.
Moreover, if your web page has a successfully planned structure, the site links will be shown under the title of your web page in the results of the search engine. This will allow the visitor of your page to access directly the information he/she is searching for (for example, books, music, and so on). This can be seen in the following image:
By default, Google displays ten search results per page. Research shows that people browse the first 3-5 Google pages, provided that the information searched is important. But if the information is less important or there are some time constraints, only the first 10-15 search results are viewed.
Depending on the specific country, the potential visitors of a web page have an option to do the Google search within national boundaries, taking the language (for example, French, German, among others) of a web page into consideration. Your SEO can be more effective if your target audience is the population of a certain country. There are fewer hits per keyword within one country than there is on the whole world wide web.