On the Web : Are You Paying Enough Attention to SEO?

6 Ways to get your SEO efforts headed in the right direction

4. Build Inbound Links
It's fine to have internal links pointing to your top 50 pages; it's more important to have links from external sites. Use one or more of the ideas below to distribute links to the page:

• distribute an electronic press release;
• send tweets to your followers on Twitter (tweets appear on their Twitter pages);
• write updates on your Facebook fan page (these will also appear on the Facebook page of anyone who has friended your own 
fan page);
• ask your email file to link to the page — many of your customers have blogs or websites;
• identify noncompetitive sites with readers who might be interested in your 50 pages — ask the sites' webmasters to add links to these pages, and offer to do the same in return; or
• use a service such as www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com to launch several information-oriented sites quickly and inexpensively on domain names that include the keyword you're trying to optimize — make the sites informative, and include links back to your e-commerce pages.

5. Hide Duplicate Content
E-commerce sites perform better when you give shoppers different ways to sort and find products. Unfortunately, these features can confuse a search engine that can't decide which version to use of a seemingly duplicated page, and thus the search engine ranks you poorly. Use Google's webmaster tools (www.google.com/webmasters/) to see how your site stacks up. You can add no-follow tags to links to hide these features from 
search engines.

6. SEO Analytics
Use SEO analytic software to track your intermediate results and find opportunities. Use Google Analytics to track SEO sales from your top 50 terms. There are other analytic packages designed to track the number of inbound links you have, as well as your ranking across multiple search engines for your 50 terms.

These metrics will tell you if your actions are making a difference before it's reflected in your sales results. Enquisite is an inexpensive, effective SEO analytic software, and Google webmaster tools also can help.

SEO takes time. Once Google picks up your changes,
it usually takes three days to five days to reflect the changes in the rankings. Patience is a virtue.

Larry Kavanagh is founder and CEO of multichannel solutions provider DMinSite (lkavanagh@dminsite.com).

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