SEO means Search Engine Optimization. The goal of SEO is to make a page “rank” higher in the results page of a search engine. SEO efforts are usually jugged by “Page Rank” This is a score that Google assigns your web page, and it is an important determinate of where a website will show up in Google’s search results.

Keywords

When trying to get a better rank in Google, or other search engines, it is important to consider what searches you want to show up for. This is part of determining what keywords to use when optimizing your site. You want to select keywords that are highly relevant to your site, and the services you provide.

You want to select keywords and then optimize the text on the website for these keywords. You want to use these keywords frequently across your site in relevant ways. But make sure to not cram too many keywords on one page, or search engines will penalize you. The number of keywords recommended is always changing, so you should look to see what people are saying a good number of keywords to use is when you go to edit your site.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are HTML tags that search engines look at to determine what your site is about. The most important Meta tags are;

-Title Meta tag. This tag is used to tell web browsers and search engines what the title of the page is. It is important to have a title that is relevant to the site, and includes the keywords discussed above.

-Keywords Meta Tag. This is a Meta tag that tells search engines the most relevant keywords on your web site. You should include all the keywords that you chose for your site in this tag.

Content

On the Internet, content is king. You should have a page with quality content. It is important that your site offers high quality, relevant, content to users. It is not quite known how Google judges the quality of content, but it does seem to prefer site that have large quantities of content over sites with little text, or irrelevant text. Make sure to not spam you users with a boatload of information they do not need, and Google will thank you for it.

Off Site Optimization

This is a key component to Google’s page rank algorithm, and thus a key component of any SEO effort. Google looks at the sites that link back to yours, and then judges how relevant the sites linking to yours are to the content on your website. Google uses this information to determine the “importance” of your page. Like with most things in SEO, quantity is not better than quality. Avoid submitting your website’s URL to huge link databases that promise better page rank. Sites like this are often frowned upon by Google, and can hurt your page rank rather than help it. Try to get people in your industry to link to your site. For example, if you sell pens, it would be helpful to have link to your site appear on a pen manufacture’s website.

Social Media

The social media frenzy is something that is sweeping the world faster than anyone could have imagined. In this day and age it is important to have your business on prominent social networks like facebook and twitter. When using social media as a business it is important to keep in mind that people who find your business on social media sites do not want a sales speech, they what to be your “friends”, they want to interact with your business in a social way. Try to use social media to generate a community around your business that your business participates in. People are more likely to use a company they feel a connection with, and this is a connection that social media can provide. Think of it like this, you are a small town hardware store, and you know most of your customers, people in your town are going to go to you when they need hardware items rather than the big nameless corporation. Having a large following on social networks can have a large positive effect on your page rank.

Page Layout

On top of having a page with relevant content, it is important to have your web pages laid out in such a way that make Google recognize the content of your page, and assign that appropriate weight to each item when calculating what your page is about. Remember to use “h1” tags for the header of your page, and only use it once per page. Google sees the h1 tag as something that identifies what the whole page is about, so choose it wisely, and try to include your keywords in it. Another thing you can do to the content of your page is making the keywords bold. Google sees words in bold as being more important.

Conclusion

Though these are just the basics of SEO, they are a good place to start when trying to improve your ranking in search results. It is important to keep in mind that Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process. If you can not keep up with the job your self you should consider having your Web Developer do it for you.

The question, Why are people abandoning shopping carts on my site, is one that has plagued E-Commerce website owners for as long as E-Commerce has been around. There are a number of reason people abandon shopping carts, and solving these problems is something that an expert E-Commerce Development Company can solve. Lets explore some reasons that people abandon a shopping cart and do not complete their transaction.

1) Poor Shipping Cost Estimates

When a customer is checking out, the last thing they want to be surprised with is a shipping cost that is obviously too high. Calculating shipping costs is not as straightforward as it sounds. Some studies show that 40% of shopping cars are abandoned because the shipping cost is too high. For more information on this topic see our post “How To Calculate E-Commerce Shipping Cost Algorithms”

2) The Checkout process is too complicated

Customers shop online because it’s easy. Customers want to spend time selecting the items they want to purchase, not figuring out how to pay for these items. For this reason it is important to have a simple checkout process that is intuitive and straight forward. When looking at your E-Commerce checkout process, step back and ask your self “if I had never seen this before, would I understand how it works”. If the answer is no, start trying to eliminate unnecessary steps in the checkout process, and then analyze how you can make the steps you deem necessary more simple and intuitive.

One thing that most E-Commerce sites forget to do is create a way for a customer to checkout with out an account. Make sure customers have an option to checkout as a guest.

3) Make sure customers can pay the way they want to.

Customers want to be able to pay the way they want to, so make sure you offer as many payment options as possible. A big reason people abandon a shopping cart is because they cannot pay they way they want. Imagine being a customer, finding all the items you want, and then finding out that the site your shopping on does not accept your credit card. In this case the customer is left with no choice but to leave.

4) Make Sure Customers Know your site is secure.

Customers have to trust you before they are going to give you sensitive personal information. Make sure that customers are reminded your site is secured at every step of the checkout process. If a customer gets to the checkout page, and forgets about the Verisign logo on you homepage, they will leave the site.

5) Load Times

Customers hate waiting. When a customer is checking out, and the shopping cart page is slow and un responsive, the customer will leave. To stop this make sure that the shopping cart page loads quickly, and that every step in the checkout process loads quickly as well. If there is not a solution to a slow shopping cart or checkout page, make sure to tell the customer that the site is in fact working.

These are just some basic reasons people abandon shopping carts on E-Commerce sites. To fix these problems, it usually takes a team of E-Commerce Experts to analyze that page. Make sure the company that is analyzing the page knows your business, and understands your customers.

Most online stores can use a simple calculation to quote customers a shipping cost in real time. But there are times when a simple shipping cost algorithm is not enough. When an E-Commerce store has a large number or products that require special handling and care, the simple shipping algorithms provided in generic shopping cart software start to show their weaknesses, which can hurt the bottom line of the E-Commerce operation.

Park East Kosher Case Study:

Park East kosher is a premium kosher food provider. They specialize in Prime quality meats, and gourmet kosher grocery products. Park East’s shipping calculation was so hard to compute that they were having people take orders online, and then calling them with shipping costs. This method was not only making the process slow for customers, but customers were giving up on their order because they did not know a definitive price for the shipping costs. They came to EcomSolutions looking to fix this problem.

Why was it so hard to compute shipping costs? First lets talk about how most online stores calculate shipping costs. Some take the product and assign a fate rate to it, and then call it a day, they say product A costs $5 to ship and product B costs $10 ship, so if a customer orders product A and B the shipping is $5+$10 = $15, and that’s the end of the story.

So why not set up a system like this for Park East Kosher? Simple. Park East Kosher has hundreds of products, some are perishable, some are not, and this means that products have different shipping costs based on whether it is perishable. The Perishable products have different handling times, and more complex packing costs.

How did we solve this problem?

Simple
 (Our Economics nerd friends should get this)

We gathered data on all the variables of past orders that we could think of. We gathered order weight data, order price date, number of items in the order, whether or not the order was perishable (0 or 1), ect. We took this data and loaded it into statistical software, and ran a linear regression. Using the results of this regression we were able to generate a formula that could accurately predict the shipping costs of an order within $5.

What we learned

When considering how to calculate your shipping costs, don’t assume that the simplest method is best. There are natural cost fluctuations in shipping costs that a simple flat rate system can’t hope to encompass, and when you factor in different packing methods needed among items, these costs start to vary even more. When you start to quote customers the wrong prices for shipping you can lose money, or worse yet lose customers.

This is a topic of E-Commerce development that is rarely talked about, or is just lumped in with the discussion of shopping cart abandonment. People automatically think of things like long load times, and poor layout as things that make people give up on completing an E-Commerce transaction, but never about the fact that they could be driving customers away with poor shipping cost estimates.

Take the example above where A cost $5 and B costs $10. Lets say item A is a Box of 20 pencils. If you ordered one of each of these products, then the shipping estimate of $15 might seem right, but say you order 50 units of product A, then the shipping estimate would $5 X 50 = $200. This estimate would make customers leave the site and go else ware, because $200 is an incredibly inaccurate estimate.

When having an E-Commerce site developed it is important that the E-Commerce Development Company developing the site has knowledge of the products, and the technical ability to generate a shipping cost algorithm that accurately estimates shipping.