Optimizing for Hits You Already Get

SEO this and SEO that. SEO's have a bad name, just like lawyers. But when you're the one that needs one, all the lawyer jokes get dropped and you hire the best. And when you run a website, no matter why you run it, you want hits, so you can either hold onto your opinion of search engine optimization and get a tiny trickle of traffic or do something about it.

I started a series on ecommerce site optimization a while back. First I told you to start with a good category structure for your site. Then I told you to throw everything you can on the net as fast as you can. Worry about how much content you can get up on your site. Many sites have already made it past these steps. The third step would be to start building traffic to your site. But there are so many different and varied ways to go about this, I am waiting on that one. And that post is more likely to be a list of links, because others have covered that subject very well.

With this post, I am assuming that you already get some traffic and that you have some sort of statistics software in place on your web site. If you have no statistics software on your web site, add it now, and read this post in a week or so. Without stats in place, it is impossible to tell what your search engine optimization efforts are doing.

Take a look at the keyphrases you get hits for and where they come from. Then re-enact the search starting with the keyphrase you get the most hits for. If your position in the search engine results is less than number one, you can do some work on it. Note all of these keyphrases where you actually get hits, but you are not yet #1. Also note the page on your site that gets these hits.

Starting at the top of the list, you are going to optimize for each one of these keyphrases. Why? Because a #1 position will get you four times as many hits as a number two. And each time your position in the search engines moves up one spot, your hits for that keyphrase will increase a lot more than what you would normally think. And if your rank in the search engine results is on the second page and you still manage to get hits, then a move up will definitely benefit you. You are already getting the hits. Why not make these hits more instead of going after hits you don't get?

So how do you optimize for these keywords. Stay tuned for tommorrow's post and I will covering product names, category naming, and product descriptions.