How Google Ranks Pages & How Adding Custom Content Can Help Your Store’s Rankings
Above: What the Google Homepage looked like a little while after it opened its virtual doors to the public in 1998.
So you have your website, but you want to get more visibility on Google. How does Google rank pages? And how do you get to a higher position on the search rankings?
How Google Ranks Pages
Google takes hundreds of unique factors into consideration while ranking websites on the search results. These can be a variety of things, such as how many other sites link to your site, how “fresh” (how recent) your content is, and over 300 other factors can contribute to how your site is going to be listed when a customer searches for your business.
The process of optimizing a website so that it can achieve higher rankings on a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo!, or Bing is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
How to use the Ecommerce Platforms for SEO
Here’s some tips to make sure that your Ecommerce website is going to be at the top of the results!
Content
The number one most important thing you need on your website to increase search rankings, is content. Unique, new, interesting, and relevant content. Now it’s much easier to decide you want content, than to actually create it. Once you formulate your content….where do you put it?
Some places to put your content:
Product Descriptions: This is a very good place and probably the best place to start placing your new content. Write about your product, describe what it does, write specifications etc. All of those things can help you start generating momentum for your website in the search rankings. PRO TIP: Google isn’t a fan of duplicate content. Don’t use Manufacturer Product Descriptions. You should instead rewrite it, or expand the description yourself. If you have so many products and you can’t add unique content to every single one, then the next type of content can help you.
Categories: Add categories of your products, and make sure to include descriptions of your products there.
Add Product Reviews to your site. This is a two-for-one, because not only will it help you sell more products when customers see all the great reviews, it’ll also be generating content. This is especially useful because you don’t have to go in and manually add content to all of your product pages, you can have it added for you!
Other important things can be to make sure that you are taking advantage of the meta description tag. This will be automatically filled if you are using an ecommerce site, but also you can custom fill it. For example in Volusion, on a product description page you can go and fill it in yourself using an input box they provide.
Boxes for adding content in Volusion
Tips on Content:
Volusion says that the best type of content to add, is content that is “useful”. This is the golden rule for content: if your content is useful, and customized to your website, the people will naturally com
Use Keywords. If you have a description that says:
“This is our Pet Food category, where you can choose from a wide variety of pet foods.”
This is a generic category description, try adding keywords to it. For example, after you change your category description, it might look like this:
“This is our Pet Food category, you can find some great organic, fresh, and inexpensive brands of pet food. Your Cat, Dog, and Fish will all find something they love here.”
The new keywords are: “organic”, “fresh”, “pet food”, “inexpensive” “cat”, “dog”, and “fish”. Try adding as many keywords as you can, without sacrificing the readability.
If you don’t know what keywords to put, try pretending to search for the page you’re working on. Try different searches. The words that you use to search are going to be more often than not, keywords. Nouns and adjectives on their own are often keywords.
