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Knowing how to optimize your website for SEO properly is one of the most important aspects of online selling. SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is merely a way to let search engines know you exist and prompt them to return your website in search results when potential customers search for things related to your website. For instance, if you are a florist, when people type in "order flowers" or "florist", if you have proper SEO, you should turn up on the first page of results. While SEO can get very complex, there are some simple steps you can take to benefit yourself greatly and drive more traffic to your website. 1.Stay relevant. The worst thing you can do is to keyword stuff, or add keywords where they don't naturally belong in the sentence, in order to get traffic. That ruins your SEO ranking and you are likely to turn off customers by essentially spamming them with keywords. This is why you should... 2.Be natural. Being natural in your speech is the second stem of staying relevant. Keeping to the point of what you sell while speaking as you would naturally speak to someone about your product is the best way to ensure high SEO rankings. However, you should... 3.Know what keywords are and how to use them. Keywords are words and terms that have to do with your website. The easiest way to narrow down your keywords is to think of what you would search for in a search engine if you were trying to find your product. Also... 4.Understand keyword density. This relates to being natural in a way, but there is something called keyword density that search engines use as a marker of whether a website is spam or not. A good rule of thumb is to use a major keyword (like flowers or florist, if that is your business) once every 100 words or so, but again, be natural. Speaking of word count... 5.Break up your website text. Nobody wants to go to a website and be confronted with a wall of text. Particularly if they aren't going to an online encyclopedia. If you're selling online something, you still need text on your web page, but put it into small chunks so the customers don't feel like they're in school. A great way to add text is to... 6.Keep a blog on your website. Many website hosting platforms, allow you to add a blog as a page to your website. This is a great way to add text to your website. Write articles that are informational, short, and relate to your product. For instance, to use the florist example, how to pick the best flowers for your garden, or the difference between a perennial and annual plant, would be a great blog entry. This also establishes your authority. Of course, it might be good to... 7.Keep a blog off-site, also. This could be a blog that is more personal and about you. People love to get to know who it is they're buying from, and that's one of your strengths as a small business owner. By having a blog off-site that tells them about you, your life, your experience as a small business owner, what got you into the business in the first place, and so on, you'll get people connected to you. This is also a great way to... 8.Link build. Link building is a way to get search engines to notice you, as well. Again, it shouldn't be overdone, but it should be done. Search engines often look at the number of links directing people to a specific website on the web in order to determine if it's relevant. If you set up 50 fake blogs with nothing but lists of links to pages on your website, that's clearly going to turn off a search engine, as they know that is spam. However, if you add links to your personal blog linking back to your website, and interlink pages of your website itself, you can drive more traffic. However, it's also good to... 9.Add some sparkle to your site. Ok, not literal sparkle, but text and photos can get boring. Adding a video, some graphics, and other things like that can get people interested. And what gets people interested gets people talking. And if they're talking, you should... 10.Have social media available on your site. After all, giving them something to talk about without a way to talk about it is kind of pointless. Make sure you have "like us" or "tweet" or "share" buttons somewhere on your site. If you want to have one on every page, you can, since it's likely each page has its own unique content. In this day and age, however, you should have social media on your site, and search engines will notice this, too. Hopefully the above information has been helpful to you in your quest to understand SEO, how it can benefit you as an online seller, and some practical ways to apply it to your site. There are many SEO companies out there charging exorbitant fees to "optimize" your webpage. However, you should make sure that they are credible. Many of them simply keyword stuff, which will only hurt your website ranking in the long run, and others simply don't know what they're doing. Make sure they are affiliated with Google Ad Sense, Amazon, and other reputable names in SEO. However, you can actually improve your ratings quite a bit on your own just by following very simple tips like the ones listed above. Egidijus Andreika runs Click2Sell Affiliate Programs Network. Sell digital products online and run your affiliate program. Accept payments via PayPal, Payoneer, Payza, Google Checkout or direct credit card payments. Get paid instantly, provide easy payment options for customers, recruit and manage affiliates successfully. Get useful information about SEO in the forum and blog. Visit Click2sell.EU
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