Here is part 2 of my SEO Tips For Your Dropshipping Website series.  We already talked about the basics of SEO, namely fresh content, keywords, inbound links, and videos.  Now we are going to go slightly more in-depth on optimizing your dropshipping website.

1. Keyword Links

You already know that it’s important to include plenty of keywords on your website and to garner plenty of inbound links from other quality websites.  But did you know that all links ON your website and TO your website should be keyword phrases themselves?  Let’s pretend you’re dropshipping bicycles, and you’ve written a guest blog post for an outdoor adventure site.  Within your guest blog post, you want a link to your website.  But you don’t want your link to read: “To find the best repair kits, visit my website.”  Instead, make that link a keyword phrase: “Click here to find the best bicycle repair kits on the market.”

2. Original Photos With Captions

Another way to bring organic traffic to your website is to have your site pop up in image searches.  Whenever you post a photo on your dropshipping website, make sure you name that photo with relevant keywords, and also include the words “picture” or “image” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions.  To give your photos an extra boost, log in to your Google Webmaster Central account and enable the “Enhanced Image Search”.  Images have become increasingly important in blended search results, so this should help your SEO.

3. Links From .Edu and .Org Sites

Search engines give more weight to links from .edu and .org domains.  Try to find a .edu or .org site for which you can write a guest blog post, educational article, or product review.  They should be willing to give you an inbound link in return.

4. Minimal Flash, Frames, and AJAX

Flash, Frames, and AJAX are not SEO friendly.  In addition, they are not compatible with new Apple products like the iPad (you can’t view flash on the iPad at all).  If you believe Steve Jobs, Flash is going the way of the dinosaurs – use other formats whenever possible on your dropshipping website.

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SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is extremely important for bringing traffic to your dropshipping website.  SEO is the process of optimizing your website so it is highly ranked on search engines like Google.  To illustrate, let’s imagine that you are operating a dropshipping website selling jewelry making supplies.  If I google the phrase “jewelry making supplies”, will your website appear on the first page?  Will it be the first link I see?  If your website doesn’t show up on the SERPs (Search Engine Response Pages) until the sixth page, your customers will probably never find it through a Google search.  Your goal is to appear in the first three listings on the first page.

Now, this is not an easy goal.  Big companies spend a lot of money to be top ranked on the SERPs.  But you can improve your ranking without spending a lot of cash, and you stand a good chance of being top ranked for more specific long-tail keywords.

How can I improve the SEO of my dropshipping website?

1. Fresh Content

Your website needs to be full of quality, relevant content, and this content needs to be updated on a regular basis.  Your goal should be to write new educational articles, tips, blog posts, and/or reviews at least 3 times a week.  Every day is preferable.  You don’t have to pen an encyclopedia, but you want to write something useful and new as often as possible.  This content needs to be full of keywords.

2. Keywords

Keywords are words that someone would search for when looking for a website like yours.  The keywords for your jewelry making site might be “jewelery”, “jewelry making supplies”, “charms”, “charm bracelets”, “costume jewelry”, “vintage jewelry”, “renaissance jewelry”, “silver chains”, etc.  It would be very difficult to optimize your site for a short-tail keyword like “jewelry” – you would be competing with every other jewelry store on the internet.  But you could more easily optimize for long-tail keywords like “jewelry making tools”, “vintage rhinestones”, and “silver settings and findings”.  Your content should be sprinkled with relevant keywords.  However, your content also must be relevant and useful to your customer – it can’t just be a string of gibberish stuffed full of keywords.

3. Inbound Links

One of the best ways to boost your SEO is to cultivate inbound links.  The important thing to remember about inbound links is that quality matters.  An inbound link from trashy, low-ranked website doesn’t help you – in fact, it can hurt you.  You need links from well-ranked websites.  The best way to get these is to have quality content that people want to link to and share.  Articles, reviews, and how-to videos are all a great way to get inbound links.  Another excellent way to get links, especially when you’re just starting out, is to guest blog post for another site.  This website should be related to your business, but not in competition with you.  For instance, you could write a guest blog post on making earrings for an arts and crafts website.  You write the article for free, and in return you get a valuable link to your website.

4. Videos

Videos are a great way to build links and bring traffic to your website.  You can make all kinds of videos, from product reviews to how-to videos.  You can then post these videos on your dropshipping website, on YouTube, and on other quality video sites like AOL, MSN, and Yahoo.  Now remember, search engines can’t index the content of a video or photograph, so you must always summarize your videos and photos with text.  This text should describe the video using plenty of relevant keywords.

SEO isn’t something you work on for a couple of weeks and then forget about it.  You will have to practice continuous SEO for as long as your dropshipping website is in operation.  Next week I’ll post an article with slightly more in-depth SEO tips.

SEO

One of the absolute most important aspects of website design and online business marketing is improving your SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.  The whole point of SEO is to get your dropshipping website listed at the top of the search engine response pages for keywords relevant to your business.  If you are operating a chocolate-dipped fruit store, you want your business to be the first one that shows up when I Google “chocolate fruit”, “chocolate-dipped fruit” and even more obscure keywords like “gourmet gifts” or “wedding shower treats”.  Efficient SEO will bring in a ton of business, often more than you could pay for through Pay-Per-Click advertising, banner ads, flyers, etc. – that’s why it’s so important.

I’ve talked a lot about basic SEO techniques in previous posts, but you should be aware that search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms to make the search experience better for users.  This means that you need to stay up to date with what the search engines are looking for.

One aspect of SEO that has become increasingly important is video.

Posting how-to and instructional videos is a great way to improve your SEO and get your business noticed, particularly for new or smaller businesses that have a hard time competing in traditional SEO.

3 things to remember when adding video to your website and your marketing efforts:

1. Video files need to be properly titled with keywords so they’re searchable.

Search engines often can’t read anything other than text (for instance they can’t read your logo if it’s an image instead of text).  Titling your video and posting a short summary or description is helpful both to search engines and to people visiting your site.

2. Your video needs to be valuable.

Your video needs to provide valuable information, blow people’s minds, or at the very least make your visitors laugh their socks off.  If your video has no value, nobody will want to watch it, link to it, or recommend it to friends.  Informative is probably the easiest note to hit, so film a video on how to perform an amazing card trick, how create the perfect rosettes for a birthday cake, or a review on the latest ergonomic bicycle helmet.  Obviously the video should be related to your product line, so the aforementioned videos would be on websites selling magic tricks, cake decorating supplies, and cycling gear.

3. Promote your video and your website on other venues

Post your video on YouTube and other popular sites.  By including a link to your website, you can bring in traffic.

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What is a meta-tag?

Meta-tags are descriptions in your HTML code that communicate with search engines and are often visible to people who find your dropshipping website on a search engine response page (SERP).

When is your meta-tag used?

Search engines like Google and Yahoo often default to the meta description information, or use part of your meta-tag and part of the text they find on the page with relevant keywords when choosing information to display on the SERP.

If your meta-tag is used on a SERP, a human being will read that information when deciding whether to visit your dropshipping website or not.

Why are meta-tags important?

Creating a compelling meta description for each page of your website gives you the most control over what people read about your site in the SERPs.  (Remember to include the same keywords as your meta-tags in your actual web page content, because that makes it far more likely that search engines will display your tag.)  Also, meta-tags occasionally impact your SEO.

What should your meta-tag say?

Your meta-tag should accurately and attractively describe your web page, using relevant keywords (though not too many or you’ll be tagged for keyword-stuffing).  It can only be 63 characters long, including spaces, so you’ll probably have to stick to around 6-12 words.  Use keywords first, adding things like your company name at the end of the description.  Your meta-tag doesn’t have to be a perfectly grammatical full sentence as long as it is clear and comprehensible for a human reader.

Check back next week for a description of how to actually insert meta-tags into your website.

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When promoting my online business, what should I spend more time and money on: Pay-Per-Click advertising, or SEO?  As you can probably guess, I’m going to tell you that both are important, but there are times when you should focus on one more than the other.

First, a definition of Pay-Per-Click and SEO:

Pay-Per-Click Advertising:

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an online advertising method where business owners pay every time their ad is clicked (usually on a search engine results page).  The amount you pay for each click depends on how much you bid (you decide ahead of time how much you will pay for each visitor).  The search engine page your ad appears on depends on the keywords you selected.  You can agree to pay a set amount, say $400, and once you’ve received enough visitors to exhaust that payment your ad automatically disappears.  This means you won’t be surprised by thousands of visitors and thousands of dollars in charges.

SEO:

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to your web site from search engines.  This is considered “natural”, “un-paid”, or “organic” traffic, as opposed to SEM (Search Engine Marketing) where you pay for inclusion on the search engine results pages.  (Pay-Per-Click advertising is SEM).   Generally, the higher your ranking on the search results list, the more visitors your website will receive, which is why it’s important to improve your search engine ranking at all times.  SEO can be improved in myriad ways, but some of the main elements include valuable, regularly updated content on your website, plenty of relevant keywords, inbound links to your site, and submission to search engines and directories.

When should I focus on Pay-Per-Click advertising?

• Pay-Per-Click is important at the launch of your website when you need to get traffic flowing quickly.
• Pay-Per-Click is great for limited-time  or seasonal promotions.
• Pay-Per-Click is important when testing ads and promotions because you can measure results easily.
• Pay-Per-Click advertising can give you a boost during slow periods.

When should I focus on SEO?

• SEO is something you need to be doing consistently all the time.

SEO is a long-term process and you won’t necessarily see results immediately.  It can be less expensive than Pay-Per-Click because many aspects of it are free (though time-consuming), so SEO is something that you can plug away at when your advertising budget is depleted.  Initially you may not see as many results from SEO as you will from Pay-Per-Click advertsising, but over time as your search engine ranking rises, it can be a consistent and low-cost way to bring in traffic.

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Google is tweaking its search engine so “real time” results are more frequently included.  Real time results are heavily weighted toward fresh content.  This means that your ranking on the SERPs (Search Engine Response Pages) could be much more volatile – you could be number 1 one minute, and number 6 a few minutes later.  How can you boost your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by taking advantage of real time searching?

First: Fresh Content All The Time

Fresh content is important with all search engines, but particularly with Google who uses an algorithm called QDF (Query Deserves Freshness).  This means that freshness is an important factor in ranking.  The newer the content the better, and the more new content the better.  If you are not adding fresh content to your dropshipping website daily, you are probably not maximizing your SEO.  This content can be as simple as a Tip of the Day or a blog post.  Make sure your content contains plenty of relevant keywords, especially in the title.  Also, try to write about topics that are current, exciting, and interesting.  Keep abreast of news and developments relevant to your product/field of interest.  This will help your search engine ranking, please your customers, and encourage people to comment on your articles and pass them along to friends.

Second: Social Media Marketing

If you haven’t been promoting your online business on Twitter, Facebook, Ning, etc., now is the time to start.  Real time searching  rewards up-to-the-minute sources like Twitter.  Social Media platforms are also a great way to get your content passed along from person to person (viral marketing).  The more catchy, interesting, and useful your information is, the more likely people are to share it.  Of course your article will contain links to your website, so promotion of your article is promotion of your site.

Ultimately real time searching rewards your hard work today instead of favoring the online businesses who have been around the longest.  Thus, real time searching is a friend to fledgling online entrepeneurs.  It allows you to compete in SEO even though you’re just a newbie, as long as you’re willing to put the time in to create quality content and build a strong social media presence.

SEO, internet marketing, website design / help