Getting the most out of your webstore: Content

This is the first post of a series of posts we’ll be doing on how to get the most out of your web store. So to begin we’ll start with the basics of effective content.

When it comes down to it, you get business from web traffic and traffic either directly (someone types in your www address) or from search engines. So when you are optimising your web store for search engines, don’t let yourself get bogged down or confused, there’s no magic secret. No special little code you hide somewhere that gets your site listed number one, it really comes down to just a few things done well.

First off, search engines simply want to provide the most helpful and relevent results to what their user has searched for, yes? So to get better ranking you need to be as helpful and relevent to your industry or topic as you can. Start with writing your content to include, in a natural way, the product names and phrases describing your items. Try also to think about how a person would look for your products in a search engine. What would they type? Try to use that in your content. However, it must read well. Simply overloading your text with keywords will not work. In fact, it will more than likely get you blocked.

Secondly, keyword and description meta tags should be provided for each of your pages. Nitrosell does this automatically for you so there is no extra work for you on this point. Keyword and description meta tags are not so important these days as the bigger search engines don’t use them a whole lot. Google for instance will use your Description tag when it first lists your website if it hasn’t found a particular part of your content to highlight and it may review your keywords tag but it certainly won’t rely on it.

You really want to work with the search engines to be as helpful/relevent as possible. Don’t confuse this with having millions of pages - that might give your customers so much choice that they end up going no where!

The last thing we’ll cover today is ‘call to action’. When you’re writing a page you should always keep in mind what you want the visitor to do after they have read the page. Providing the page is not a product description or special offers page, which are self-explanatory, you should present the user with a ‘call to action’. This is something that prompts the user to do what you want them to do. So it could be a text link to a product, a ‘Buy Now!’ button or a contact us form.

If you implement the practices outlined above, you will see an increase in traffic as Google rewards you and also an increase in sales as you will be converting more visitors to customers.

Tags: EPOS, Nitrosell, optimizing your web store, retail pos, search engine optimization