If you are looking to optimise your e-commerce site to get up the rankings, there are a few strategies you can use. One such strategy which all experts will agree on, is optimising and creating content in the shape of text, audio and even video. Sounds easy enough, however for e-commerce sites it is not always possible.

Here are 8 tips for optimising e-commerce sites through content:

1. Update descriptions often – On top of making your descriptions standout due to their originality, you should also aim to get those pages crawled often by the engines. One way to achieve this is by offering new content within those pages on a regular basis. If you are struggling to find new content to enhance the description, look at your customer support emails. Chances are that users are emailing you questions for information which wasn’t clear so your answers could also be added to the product’s description. eBay for example does this well by allowing sellers to post a buyer’s question and their answer.

2. Use keywords wisely – Using the right keywords in the product descriptions does not mean repeating the same keywords over and over. It is ok to repeat a variation of the keyword a few times or make it bold once or twice, but whatever you do, make sure it reads well. Remember the search engine isn’t your customer, you and I are. If the product description is unique and reads well you’ve ticked all the right boxes.

3. Make all your content accessible - Types of content might be inaccessible to the search engines and therefore for users for a selection of reasons. Especially for e-commerce sites where good content is hard to come by, this represents a missed opportunity. You might feel that the content is so valuable that users must subscribe first to view it, or it is coded in such as way which makes finding the content by the engines very difficult. Content such as help forums, questions and answers pages and even product guides should become accessible as a priority.

4. Keep in mind content ratio – Web content can take many shapes and forms from text to images and even audio. If your traffic goal is to gain traffic from social media sites, perhaps creative content will work well, however to increase search engine rankings text is still preferred. Keep the ration between text and other forms of content favorable towards text, but do continue to offer creative content as well. Hence the emphasis should be on ratio.

5. Avoid copy and paste – It is a common practice for e-commerce sites with many SKUs to take the manufacturer’s product descriptions and copy paste them. By doing so, perhaps you have full product descriptions, however other sites are using the precise same wording making your content secondary. To ensure your content stands out and by doing so you have the best possible chances to rank well, write your own product descriptions or re-write parts of the original description.

6. Encourage content sharing – After working hard to create quality content, you should aim to get your content out there and shared across social media sites and between users alike. The first step after the content creation is to integrate a social sharing button across all your pages, from product pages to how-to guides. There are couple of options you could consider, all are free and easy to integrate. Some offer more back end functionality than others, such as analytic reporting so I would narrow the list to www.addthis.com and www.sharethis.com.

7. Stay current with your content – It’s all fine and well to work on creating quality content, however you want people to look for this content. For e-commerce sites, content is often the products themselves or as some site owners call it, the long tail. Therefore you should look to offer products which are in high demand or those which are projected to grow. Read industry blogs to find out which products are coming to your industry or look at yearly trends using sites such as Google Trends.

8. Pay attention to grammar and spelling – If there’s one thing that will instantly cause the opposite of optimising through content, is displaying poor content. Grammar and spelling mistakes will lower your credibility as a seller and will prevent users from sharing your content. Use a spell checker before uploading any content and consider asking another pair of eyes to go over your work. If users notify you of a mistake in the copy, act quickly to resolve it.

You wake up one morning, open your favorite analytics program and discover that your organic traffic has decreased over night. If you’ve done nothing to violate Google’s terms and conditions it’s quite frustrating. Here’s a useful guide for common reasons of drop in traffic, how to check each one and possible fix.

1. Site IP Address Change – If you haven’t already I’d recommend getting a fix IP address from your host. A change in IP address to one which has been blacklisted or even random changes could undermine your ranking. Keep a record of your IP address on file or use Domain Tools to view your IP address status or IP address history if you haven’t kept a record. The last one is a paid for service.

2. Domain Blacklisted - I hear this often, ‘my domain has been blacklisted’ and almost always it isn’t the case. If you search for site:domain-name in Google and get results, you’re not blacklisted. If you’re getting no results found you might have a problem which could be down to getting blacklisted or even using the robots.txt file incorrectly. You’ll need to get to the bottom of the possible reason and file a reconsideration request. Take this request very seriously, admit what you think might have gone wrong and how you’ve now taken steps to rectify the problem.

3. Outbound Spammy Links – Mostly common for blogs with little or no comment enforcing policy, it might also occur for websites offering user and product reviews with the option to hyperlink. One spammy link getting through the net could see the that page disappear from the index. Start by enforcing a comment / review policy, use spam filters and check your current outbound links using bad neighborhood. Once the offending link has been removed, the page will appear in the index the next time it’s crawled.

4. Aggressive Internal Linking - Leveraging internal linking to optimise your site is a legitimate tactic. For example, internal linking between closely related products will help boost their authority. On the other hand, linking back to your homepage from every page with an optimised anchor text might result in an automated penalty as Rand pointed out. If the drop in traffic happened after you’ve made this change, then revert back.

5. Site Structure Change – I always recommend against doing site-wide structure changes to an existing and well indexed site. If you’ve done this, I guess you had your reasons, still when possible perform structural changes hand in hand with a testing procedure so you’re able to quickly go back to the previous structure. If you suspect your change might help explain the drop in traffic, you can either wait for the engines to fully index the site (that is if you’re 100% certain the change is going to work) or revert back.

6. Misuse of Robots.txt File – The ease in which webmasters and site owners could update the robots.txt file is its great attraction, but also makes this file dangerous at times. Blocking certain pages and directories which previously proved essential to your SEO efforts might help explain drop in traffic in the long tail. If you suspect the robots.txt file might be the cause, analyze it using Google Webmaster tool.

7. Breach of Webmaster Terms and Conditions – If you’ve breached Google’s T&C you’ll need to face the music and try to resolve it. Your first action is to fix the breach and ensure your site complies with the T&Cs. Now you’ll need to file a reconsideration request with the precise action you’ve taken to fully comply with Google and wait a few weeks for an engineer to look at your case. MattCutts of Google suggested recently at PubCon that you might want to look at a new domain and start fresh, though only for very serious cases of violation.

8. Change in Google’s Algorithm – Google constantly changes its algorithm, be it a small update or a major update such as Google Caffeine it might affect your traffic. If such an update does end up affecting your traffic, it will also affect others. Search Google and fine tune the results by date to see if anyone else experienced a change. There’s little you can do in the short time, you need to hope further algorithm tweaks will restore your ranking or you’ll need to optimise your site better in accordance with new update.

9. Your Site Was Hacked - If your site was hacked and injected with scripts and viruses it might disappear from the index or users might be getting a message about malware on your site. There are many checks you can make, but basically you’ll need to fix the hack and file a type of reconsideration request called a malware review of your site. Once again the key is to explain to the engineer looking into your case actions you’ve taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again, from upgrading your software to blocking FTP and running a virus check on your PC.

10. Keyword Penalty – Be in algorithmically or manually you might experience penalty based on a keyword, rather than a site-wide penalty. If you’ve moved on a keyword level over night from page x to page x + 10/20/30 justly or wrongly you’ve probably been penalized. Try and find the reason why, it might be from aggressive anchor text reach internal linking, to a spammy outbound link finding its way through the crack to a Google mistake. The last one can happen when a new site in particular enjoys a large amount of backlinks in a short space of time, it seems unnatural to Google and gets penalized. If you suspect that might be the case, guess what… you’ll need to file a reconsideration request.

11. Seasonal Change – If you’re offering seasonal products or service, don’t be too surprised when your traffic drops. If you’re new to the industry and have little historical information to work on such as using Google Analytics, try using Google Trends for some insights.

12. Pages Dropped From The Index – Large sites with many SKUs are more susceptible to drop in traffic due to certain pages, in particular long tail pages disappearing from the index. This might happen due to content duplication, poor use of the canonical tag or even due to a structural change. Use the site: operator and keep a record of your findings, in particular use the site: operator on a directory level for more precise results i.e. site:site-name.tld/directory/

13. You’ve Lost Some Authority – The last one is tricky to diagnose. If you’ve enjoy links from authoritative sources and those links are now gone for what ever reason, it can influence your ranking over time. You can get a feel for the number of backlinks you have and perhaps their authority if you can recognize names, however the best advice is to keep on building natural quality links.

Hopefully I’ve not missed too many reasons.

Other than a few selected few at the kingdom of Google and co, no one really knows for sure which link gives you more authority, which link is passing juice and which link is discounted straight away. We make assumptions, we test, we analyze, and sometimes we come very close to the actual workings of the engines. If you’ve ever analyzed the backlinks profile of a successful site over a long period of time, you’ll notice that their link building profile looks natural and natural doesn’t only mean little or no paid links but seems at time quite all over the place.

There are over 20 unique backlink factors I’d like to call natural link building indicators which shade light on this type of strategy. Needless to say, as a long term search engine optimisation strategy, natural is good, but it doesn’t mean you can’t gently nudge the strategy your way provided you keep within the guidelines.

20 Indications That Your Link Building is Natural:

1. No paid links, link farms, bad neighborhoods etc

2. Some of the backlinks to the site are image links

3. Some of the image links, dare I say… have no alt text and the image name has nothing to do with the site

4. Some text backlinks will contain your keywords… result!

5. Some of the text backlinks will contain the metadata page title

6. Some of the anchor text might include unoptimized terms such as ‘click here’, ‘find out more, ‘ here’ etc

7. Some of the backlinks are likely coming from bloggers

8. Some of the backlinks are likely coming from forums

9. There’s minimal or no use of directories as an SEO strategy

10. There’s minimal or no use of article submission as an SEO strategy

11. You’ll see a few indications of PR generating some quality backlinks

12. In terms of IP geo location, some of the backlinks will come from territories you’re not really targeting

13. TLDs likely to include some .org  and .edu/.ac will only further help

14. A large percentage of pages linking out to the site will have no or low PR

15. A large percentage of the sites linking out will link from deeper pages… not just the homepage

16. Some links will include foreign language anchor text or surrounding text

17. Some of the links will lead to 404s, it happens some people won’t link correctly so make sure you fix this

18. The number of backlinks is growing constantly

19. Backlinks to the site are spread across many pages, not one or two highly optimized pages

20. Some of the links might come from less reputable sources without your doing, but you’d assume Google knows that and would simply discount those links

You’ll be wise to try and ensure your link building looks as natural as possible, especially if you’re counting on search engine optimisation as a marketing strategy for the long run. Ensure that your content is fresh and update to date, that you have basic tools to share content (a la addthis and co) and that you understand that taking a shortcut right now might mean quick wins, but a poor long term strategy.

Quick wins and search engine optimization, can it be? They say there’s no quick wins in SEO and successful campaigns take time, energy and sometimes some cash. While this is very much true, there are some search engine optimization tips which will almost guarantee quick wins and require very little investment.

1. Find and fix any error pages – These error pages are poor for user experience, poor for the engines and might be a missed opportunity as some might carry page rank or even some authority. To find these pages, type www.sitename.com/<any-non-valid-page> and look at the page title of an error page. Now head to Google Analytics < Content < Content by Title and type the page title in the Filter Page Title box. Click on the page title to find all the error pages you’ve got and fix them. If Google Analytics isn’t tracking your error pages, head to Google Webmaster and verify your site to receive a complete list of error pages (amongst other useful info).

2. Check for images without alt text and fix this – Alt text for images is becoming very important for SEO and recent tests show that it carries as much if not more weight than an H1 tag. Juicy Studio has a free tool for checking alt text and other issues.

3. Rename your images using a descriptive phrase – I often see product and service images with odd naming conventions such as sitename.com/images/6799_98.jpg. Renaming your images using a keyword rich phrase such as sitename.com/images/product-name.jpg will help with image search traffic. Use a free tool such as xenu to find all your images and their naming conventions.

4. Use AdWords to test the best page title in terms of CTR – While you might be slightly lower than your competitor for a particular keyword, you are able to match the overall diversity of clicks by opting for a great call to action page title. Why AdWords? using rotating ads function in AdWords you are able to source the best Ad creative and apply its call to action for page title, for example <key terms> < call to action> :: <brand> or Blue Widgets Exclusive Deals :: Site Name

5. Start spending more time creating content – Chances are you’re spending most of your SEO efforts on link building in the shape of directories, social sites, link requests etc, however great content can often be more productive for link building. Start spending at least 10% of your time creating how to guides, on line tutorials, video demos, editorial reviews etc. You’ll find that great content will get those natural links the engines just love.

Bonus tip – If you haven’t already, install a social bookmark button such as Add to Any across your site. Links from social bookmarking sites and other social properties are another example of natural links which are seen very favorably by the engines.