Search engines are always changing the rules. But there are basic rules that rarely ever change. The five tips that have always been important and I predict will continue to be for years to come are:
- Search engines are savvy, so concentrate on text. Search engines only read text.
- Think about how a customer would search for your products. Do keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool, and use those words in your content to attract buyers.
- Don’t just list your products but describe them well.
- Use alt tags and/or captions to identify every photo on your website. Google searches on those too.
- Proactively create useful, relevant content people want to share and link back to. You can create articles that are part of your site or, better yet, add a blog.
And, of course, links from quality sites that relate to your business continue to be important. That is one reason why a listing on GiftBasketNetwork.com should be a major part of your SEO.
Diane, Thanks for sharing your experience. The important thing with the alt tags is not whether they show up in different browsers but because these tags are read by the spiders from the search engines and are used in determining the relevance of a page. They are just one more way to show the spider bots what that particular page is all about.
And you are so right about using different descriptions and keywords for each page and each product on your site. So many shopping carts just use the same ones for every product. This is one of those very essential things that should be changed first when trying to optimize a site.
I manage my own website SEO and loading our products to our website, and I am self taught.
One thing that does make a difference Joyce is that different things happen with different browsers. My website is set in Explorer, but I tend to use Google Chrome. When I use this, my images on Chrome lose their Alt tags. Adding a blog to our website has been an interesting part to our website.
Another point that helps SEO is to use different descriptions and keywords relating to each product, not putting the same keywords throughout your website. This takes time, but you can then focus on a different customer type with each product.