Carolina Rustica CEO Spills SEO Secrets

The rise of personalized search (a la Google), social networking platforms, and consumers’ increasing reliance on local and mobile search have created new opportunities to gain visibility for your Website through good SEO.

This past January alone, more than 60 million people used their mobile devices to access online information. With good SEO, your Website has a significant opportunity to be found by these users.

SEO also plays a role in maximizing your search engine marketing budget. Put another way, SEO is more cost-effective than paid search programs.

For example, the .10/click we paid for our keywords in 1997 is $3/click today for the same keywords. And there is no end to the number of new competitors we see every year, which further drives up the cost of these terms for our paid search campaigns.

So how can i-merchants perform good SEO easily and cost-effectively?

My list of best practices brings together SEO, paid search and other practices, as true SEO does not operate in a vacuum. It’s also generated from more than a decade of operating my furniture and lighting retail Website, Carolinarustica.com.

Content is king
This is the single most important consideration for optimizing your Website. Yet it’s amazing how many Website owners and designers neglect Website content.

You should be an expert on the products you sell, and be able to address any conceivable questions customers may have, either on your product pages, or in your FAQ’s, or elsewhere. Including customer reviews on your site is a great way to accomplish this.

Also, make your site informative and straightforward, and other folks will not only want to visit your site, but they may link to it from their own sites and blogs.

Next: Pay-per-click, On-site search, Analyze & Optimize