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“Being better than 98 percent of the competition used to be fine. In the world of Google, though, it’s useless. It’s useless because all of your competition is just a click away, whatever it is you do. The only position you can count on now is best in the world”.
Seth Godin, The Dip
If you’re struggling to conquer the market-share of your industry, online or offline, Seth Godin, author of The Dip offers some advice on why businesses often fail to achieve top-status in thier field.
1. You run out of time
2. You run out of money
3. You get scared
4. You’re not serious about it
5. You lose interest or enthusiasm or settle for being mediocre
6. You focus on the short term instead of the long, and quit with the short term gets too hard
7. You pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world
It means online marketing focus needs to be limited to the keywords and markets where you can clearly win. Any attempt to capture ideal keywords that are too expensive or out-of-reach, due to strong competitive presence, can turn to be disaterous.
Your online marketing and advertising dollars must start with limited achievable target, where you can make a small empire for your business, and dominate the niches that you can win. There are lots of tools to help achieve this, but it begins with the understanding of your business capability, and your own understanding of the market.
Many e-commerce shopping cart vendors on the market do not equip their shopping carts with the ability to execute effective search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in an automated fashion (meaning within the back-end, without you having to do it instead of the machine). Such SEO techniques are the reasons why Websites attain some of the top search engine rankings (i.e. the position a Website when someone searches up a keyword on Google, as an example.)
You would think that if the shopping cart does not execute such SEO techniques automatically in the back-end while the business owners focus on the more important sides of their businesses, the vendors would at least show or teach them how to carry out the techniques themselves. For whatever reason, many e-commerce vendors fail to do this as well. And whether it’s due to a lack of care or a lack of expertise, the bottom line is that the shopping cart should automatically execute SEO techniques for your Website and if that is not provided, then the vendor should at least teach you how to do them.
One might ask, what kind of SEO techniques are we talking about and give me the proof that they will help my Website and shopping cart climb up the search engine results. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is an image of the some of the most basic SEO that you should use. This is one of our clients who is using Halixo as their shopping cart and Website.
You will notice three sections that are outlines in red. Each section has the keywords “Henri Lloyd Jacket” placed in it so that when someone searches for those keywords, Google (or other search engines) will bring up your Website in the search engine results since those keywords are contained on your Website, in several areas:
1) This is the page title, which is one of the most important sections to place your keywords in since Google places valuable emphasis on it, in determining the search engine ranking your Website will get when someone searches the keyword expression “Henry Lloyd Jacket.”
2) The keywords definitely should be placed in the heading of the product as well. Some Website owners do not take the time to give specific names for their products and end up with a general name like “winter jacket” or “HR jacket”, which do not help their search engine rankings at all since people will most likely be searching up specific keywords such as “Henry Lloyd Jackets.”
3) The keywords are also placed on the “bread crumb” trail, which tells the visitor where they are on the Website.
4) Last but not least, here is a hidden secret that many sites don’t know about. Placing keywords into your images, just as long as they relate to the image. Instead of having an image name of “pic1.jpg” for example, give it a good name with relative keywords such as “Henri Llloyd Ocean Jacket” in the above image. This is why this site is ranked #4 out of 16,000 search results when you search up those keywords on Google. Have look for yourself:
These are only four of many other SEO techniques that help your Website attract great search engine rankings. Many shopping carts do not execute such techniques automatically and require you to do so yourself. Halixo, on the other hand, does it for you automatically and behind the scenes. All you have to do is give the product a specific name (something that Internet users will search up, such as “Henry Lloyd Jacket”) and then Halixo will take that name and place it within the strategic areas of your Website--areas that Google looks for when crawling your Website while looking for keywords. We already showed you four of those strategic areas (page title, bread crumb trail, product heading, and product name), not to mention other important areas such as the hidden description (meta tags), cross-selling text, alt image text, and the list goes on.
The important thing to understand is that Google wants to see specific keywords placed within strategic areas on your Website, at the right quantity, and at the right density as well. Halixo does all of this for you just from having you enter the specific name of your product once, and only once! Imagine having to enter keywords in all of the strategic places of your Website for 1000+ products or more? So, not only will Halixo increase your revenues, but it will save you a lot of money and time by preventing you to go through such daunting tasks.
February 20th, 2010
