What Online Retailers Should Know About SEO

The web is a huge market and it is probably the reason why retailers are jumping into online selling nowadays. When you do a search for an online store, you'll be receiving results that categorizes from apparel to gadgets and even food. Search is a big part of being on the web and placing the top rank is definitely a website's goal. This include online retail websites and below are what online retailers should know about SEO.

1. Always Add New Content

Online Retailers should keep in mind that adding new content about their products increases their opportunity of being on the top search rank. They should not only focus on selling, but also on giving new valuable content to their customers to engage them more.

They can put case studies about their prodducts on their site, news and product offerings.

2. Remove Duplicated Content

Repetitive content usually occurs on product descriptions. Online retailers should refrain from having the same description with similar products. Try on focusing on the distinguishing characteristics of that product. This will add content to your website and lessen the chance of being penalized by search engines.

3. Pull Traffic Towards Static Pages

For some online retailers, product change probably weekly or monthly. Adding new products will do increase your rank but removing them might be a negative thing, especially that search engines takes time on indexing website content.

To avoid this, you should focus your traffic more on static pages such as the category of your product instead of the individual product page itself.

4. Optimize Product Catalogs That Are On PDF Format

Most of online stores place their catalogs on PDFs and they usually forget to optimize them too. We know that images are more attractive but we prefer text-based catalogs for search engines to crawl.

Just like how you optimize your HTML page, include keywords on headlines, anchor text hyperlinks and in copy and meta descriptions.

Keep the size of the PDF as small as it can be to avoid customers desert your PDF before even reading it.

Lastly, make sure that all document properties are complete especially the title.

5. Don't Forget To Optimize Your Images

We can't deny that images are needed in an online retail website so better yet optimize them for the search engine to read it. Incorporate your keywords on those alt texts and titles to increase your ranking.


***Image used is from Meles Musings Website

The Future Walkman, Reader and VAIO

Watch this video of Sony Contrast's concepts of the future walkman, reader and VAIO.

Google Wave Preview

It has been a hot topic everywhere. Google Wave here, Google Wave there, and people are really looking forward to using it. Unfortunately, not everyone can experience it yet, Google Wave Preview is set for developers and testers.

Google Wave intends to combine instant messaging, e-mail, document handling and social networking. With all of these features, this test that they will be doing is going to be big. There will also be extensions or applications that you can add, which can be developed by anyone, since it is open source. Somehow similar to Facebook and Twitter where you can also make your own application, but this one's different because it's catered more to corporate clients.

Image from Google Wave website

Bugs and crashes had occurred during some tests, according to one of the developers of Google Wave. However, Google is a big name in the industry, so I am pretty sure that this real-time communications service is going to be a success.

There’s still no specific time frame for the public release of Google Wave but invites for the preview are already out. More than 100,000 developers, individual testers and some corporate users of Google Applications will be given a chance to use it.

So, will Google Wave be a scare to Facebook and other social networking sites? We’ll see. Besides, who would not want this kind of tool where almost everything you need is in there.