by Rebecca Mikulin

Created on: June 30, 2010

Over the past decade, eCommerce has increased to the point that most businesses realize far more revenue online than offline – if they even have a physical, brick-and-mortar location. While this has proven to be a boon for businesses everywhere that no longer have to worry about having enough local customers to support very specialized niches, it can also be a monstrous challenge to anyone looking to break into eCommerce for the first time. Why? Not only is it likely that thousands of other retailers carry the exact same product(s), the search engines have also become increasingly sophisticated to meet the demand for accurate search results. Let’s face it, there’s only so many ways a search engine can differentiate itself. This means that you, the business owner or marketing director, have to discover the best ways to tell the search engine what you sell and who will be interested. This process is known as search engine optimization (SEO).

What are you selling?

Maybe you have a whole product line that you feel is unique, or that you bring something unique to, and you want to get it all out there – or maybe you just have two or three star products that you want people to be able to find and buy. Pick your priorities and research keywords related to those products. Using Google’s AdWords keyword research tool or something similar, you’ll want to try to find at least one keyword that gets a lot of traffic and will doubtless be through the roof on competition. Next, find two or three keywords that have traffic sufficient for your current goals that have little or no competition. These will be worked into your site description, meta tags, and product descriptions or site content.

Anyone who has been in sales for any amount of time knows the value of a good description, and it’s no different in eCommerce. Using the previously-researched keywords, craft descriptions that clearly explain what the customer can expect and why this is the product they need. While the optimum keyword density is under debate with SEO experts, having each keyword in once about every 100 words (approximately once in each paragraph) seems to be quite effective, with the primary keyword occurring in the first sentence of the description and preferably near the beginning of each paragraph. If your site is designed to show off a very specific, limited product line or single product, you may instead opt to include content that is related to the product

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