Sam Tilston | Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) » Social Media

Shopify SEO

admin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:31:55 +0000

So you’ve decided to dip your toe into the murky world of ecommerce and escape your day job, congrats and good luck! If you choose the right product to sell then your business will quickly flourish. You can see my ipad accessories shopify store here.

Here are a few tips to get your SEO right on your Shopify store.

Shopify SEO

If you had a site/store previously, redirect the old pages to the new pages on shopify admin.
Redirect non-www to www on shopify admin
Set your collections url names to match keywords you are targeting.
Remove standard footer links and replace with a few keyword links to internal pages.
Get your own domain name, this is essential!
Add regular content to your blog with internal links to different products and shopping categories.
Change the name of your store to include keywords you’re targeting.
Add Google analytics to your store and add to Google webmaster tools.
Add some welcome homepage text with a short description including links to internal pages.

Some great Shopify apps to add are…

Marketbrain - essential for tracking sales, stock, etc
Jilt – Auto email people who abandoned their cart
Optimizely – Easy A/B testing
Dealy – Automate daily deals and deals to facebook/twitter
Minimum Orders – Make sure people don’t buy a £2 product with free shipping

Hope that’s helpful and contact me if you’d like some more traffic from Google.

Enjoy.

3 Fatal Mistakes to Avoid when Optimizing for Search Engines

admin — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 14:09:48 +0000

The internet is littered with billions of articles and web pages, all fighting for the attention of readers. With thousands, if not millions, of web pages on any given subject, competition to get your web content on to the first page of the Google search results is stiff. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential tool for getting your web content noticed; with a little SEO knowledge, you can stack the odds in your favour by employing a few little tricks to get your content a higher rank in search results. But if used incorrectly, SEO can easily go horribly wrong, and may even get you banned from search results. Here are three fatal mistakes to avoid when optimizing for search engines:

Keyword stuffing

The use of keywords and key phrases is the most important part of search engine optimization; without keywords, search engines wouldn’t know how or where to find your content. However, many website owners and content writers have tried to ‘cheat’ the search engines by keyword stuffing in a bid to gain higher rankings. Keyword stuffing happens when you overload the content, title, and meta tags with keywords or phrases to the point where there is no coherent sentence structure left. Search engines like Google and Bing have become wise to this, and many will simply ignore pages that appear to be stuffed with keywords.

Unscrupulous backlinks

Another important part of SEO is building a reservoir of quality backlinks to your content. Backlinks are links that are placed on other web pages linking back to your content. Search engines use the amount of quality backlinks connected to your content to help calculate your ranking in search results. Underhand techniques to increase backlinks, such as using link exchanges or setting up websites purely to act as a repository for backlinks will result in your content being ignored or banned by search engines. Make sure all your backlinks are from a reputable source.

Poor quality content

Search engines are becoming evermore sophisticated in their approach to sifting through content. Content that doesn’t make sense, or that contains so many errors that the text is unreadable, will often be ignored or demoted in the rankings. The search engine may assume that your content is just a mix of blatant keywords loosely strung together, and of no real value to readers. Creating quality content is the only way to keep the search engines happy.

Online retail is up…. again

admin — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:18:58 +0000

Doesn’t look like slowing down anytime soon.

Power of Social Media

admin — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:14:41 +0000

SERM – Search Engine Reputation Management

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:41:27 +0000

It’s pretty simple. Signup the brand/person to loads of strong web properties. These can include LinkedIn Twitter MySpace Facebook Flickr Yahoo Google CrunchBase Qype You get the idea… Point some links with relevant anchor text and the newly created profiles … Continue reading →

Social Media Monitoring

admin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:40:26 +0000

Have found a good solution for social media monitoring. Just enter your brand or phrase keyword and it will track all mentions in real-time!

http://www.samtilston.com/monitor/

This one is even better, pretty damn sweet…

http://addictomatic.com/topic/Sam+Tilston

Enjoy.

Free Twitter Friend Adder

admin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:06:02 +0000

Feeling like you need a few more twitter buddies? No worries, just use the website below and you can get loads of twitter friends easily.

http://www.twitteradder.com/

Enjoy!

Spamming Sphinn

admin — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:47:04 +0000

Managed to get to the first page of Sphinn.com for about an hour before they deleted my article. Was good while it lasted…

Enjoy!