“UNIQUE” is the Buzzword

Is your website filled with content but yet not giving you the desired traffic?? It is said that ‘Content is King’, or is it?? If yes, then why isn’t your website the king in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)?? What ingredient is missing from your content that is making it unpalatable for the search engines? Uniqueness! Probably, your website is flooded with duplicate or non-original content. If there is one thing Search Engines love, it’s unique content. Ranking high in the SERPs is important, because higher the rank, the more traffic you’ll potentially direct to your website. A unique content will take you to that throne of supremacy. This makes “unique content” the supreme master of the internet world. ?>?>?>

What is Unique Content?

Any fresh content that is out of the ordinary and appeals to the reader is a unique content. In short, unique content is a website material that is totally different from content elsewhere on the net.

Benefits, Benefits, Benefits!

A unique content comes with a whole lot of benefits.

• It builds your credibility with visitors, thus creating trust and expanding your reader base

• Your website will be visited very often by the search engines to index your pages in their search results

• Unique and original articles in your website means you’ll be totally free from ‘duplicate content’ penalties

• Ultimately, a unique content that is completely search engine optimized, results in higher traffic and leads to a higher ROI

A boon in every sense!!!

Having a search engine optimized website and ranking top in the SERP is every website owner’s dream. A unique content makes this dream a reality thus, proving to be a boon in its truest sense.

If content is King, then who is Queen?

Andrew Heyward Former CBS News president says, "I think there will be a new Darwinism. In an era of authenticity, quality will win out. You're going to see much more emphasis on the highest quality products winning." This theory can be applied to content too. Content, quality content is a sure-fire way to make your website better.

Always try to be a step ahead of your competitor. Whatever he does, you do better. He has more content on his site, increase yours. He has more number of keywords? Well, what’s stopping you? Invest in some retail SEO tactics. So now you have good content and ample keywords. Does that mean that your website is ahead of your competitor’s?

Ah well, horses for courses. Just because you have optimized content doesn’t mean your job is done. You have to give some serious thought to linking. In search engine optimization ‘off page’ factors like link building strategies have a great deal of impact on rankings. Before going for link building, do some research on your competitor. Type in: link: http://www.competitorsdomain.com/ into the Google search box. The result will show the list of sites that are linked to your competitor’s site. Some might be social networking communities, blogging sites, paid links – both one way and two (reciprocal) way link exchanges, some might be directories like dmoz.org or Yahoo, and others might be domain related articles, references or testimonials. Try to analyze how he got these links and go about doing your own retail SEO link building. Steer clear of link farms, low quality links or huge link exchange programs. Link farms are sites that have nothing but links while low quality links are sites with little or no content. Else your site will get penalized or even booted out of a search engine’s result. Target only those links which will contribute positively towards user experience. Get links from authoritative sites, or links from sites that share the same focus as your site. So, I feel relevant linking is definitely the Queen.

I am sure some might argue with me over the fact that I chose link building over interaction, relevance and so on. These factors are important, vital for the survival of your kingdom (your website) but they are not the Sovereign.

Content and linking will definitely make a royal pair and your website can revel in royal success!

Keyword research mistakes you shouldn’t make

Keyword research is one of the most important processes of search engine marketing. It can make or break an online search campaign. Since search engine provides websites and ads that are most pertinent to the search terms (keywords), these keywords should be plugged in properly within the content of the site so that engines can easily identify them to rank the site well in the search result.


There are so many complexities involved in keyword research process. Hence, chances of making mistakes that could minimize the effectiveness of search campaign are very high. The following are few keyword research mistakes that every online company should avoid…


Targeting not so popular keywords

Ignoring keyword relevancy

No comprehension of user objective in keyword selection

Going for single keywords like “Books” (You are not Amazon or barnesandnoble)

Not grouping keywords under specific industry and category

Overlooking the competition for a keyword

Using keywords that cost you big money without returns

Not allocating sufficient resources and time for conducting effective keyword research campaign

Google is TOP again

HITWISE, an online competitive intelligence firm announced the search engine market share in the United States for April 2008. Refer the above chart to see the percentage of share own by major search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and other.

It is clear that even if yahoo and msn merge together they cannot compete with Google. For more details visit Search Engine land and HitWise

Internet retail rely on The Search King - Google

Amazon.com has always played a revolutionary role in determining the operations of e-retailers. But, when marketing web sites are taken into account, Google takes the upper hand. It has added to the growth and prospects of the e-retailers. Since its commencement, Google has given sole importance to customers, not to the publicity returns; even a paid advertisement is search dependent.

Through this attitude, Google has won hearts of millions of customers and has become the top search engine worldwide which has boosted its image among the advertising market as well. Its brand value has made Search Engine Marketing as the primary and productive means of marketing web sites and the most revolutionary marketing form. Google has a better expertise of consumers approach and develops the results and SEM offerings accordingly. Google’s substantial leap in Internet searches is beyond comparison. No other search engine can compete with this giant search engine.

Google has recently launched its latest tool for helping e-retailers to improve conversion rates by using a starter web analytics package. This tool will not hinder other sophisticated web analytics product’s business; rather the smaller retailers can gain a basic know-how of their business flow with this innovative package. It is experiencing an overwhelming response from smaller and larger e-retailers as well.

This tool has substantially helped the retailers to improve their online sales. Google has always rendered a variety of innovations to the market. From Google Site Search and Enterprise Search to Google Checkout, it has always made its statement. When RSS feeds became the rage, Google made a timely acquisition of FeedBurner last year. It has never hesitated to round out its web offerings through acquisition than internal development. The acquisition of YouTube is a spectacular example from a financial and strategic perspective.

Google has taken retailers, who rely on it, to a new horizon by taking over the web business. The term “Googlespeed” stands perfect for how quickly and efficiently it has taken eminent position in the market. Microsoft’s fear to lose its position and the rush to buy Yahoo in $45 billion is an remarkable example of Google’s glory.

Google dominates search in January

The leader is always magnificent, Google is no exception to it. Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06. Google has definitely taken a lead over its competitors in terms of search market share. According to Nielsen Online data for January, even if Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. join forces, they would only have half of the market share of the giant leader Google Inc.

Nielsen says, U.S. internet users alone have searched on Google 4.2 billion times in January representing 56.9% of all the online searches made during that period. Also, Yahoo had 19% of the search market followed by Microsoft’s MSN/Windows with12.1%. The three search engines together accounted for 88% of U.S. searches for the month of January 2008.

An average Google user carried out 39.6 Google searches compared to 25.1 times for Yahoo and 30.1 searches for Microsoft’s MSN. Nielsen also published the top 10 U.S. search engines for the month of January. The publication also included other details like the number of searches, market share, and number of searches per individual.

Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine." - Sergery Brin (Google Co-Founder). This definately proved that Google is the most popular search engine as most people prefer to search here than elsewhere.

cheap ways to build back links to your product/Category page

Building links to the product page has dual advantage...

1. You get direct visitors to your website/page

2. Search engines love links and probably would rank the product page well in SERP.


I can second guess the thought plaguing you, “link build is not an easy task”. Yes, I agree. Link building is tough; it requires lot of patience, hard work and consistency. But once the campaign is done successfully, you’ll get a lot of traffic because it’s the trump card for high search engine ranking.


I have listed out some of the unique ways to build links to the retail website product/category pages which would cost nothing except time….. Ok, maybe some money too.


1. Start Blogging

2. Write product descriptions (features and benefits) with a link back to the product page and submit them to article directories .

3. Write something unique about the product and see if you are get picked by social media surfers.

4. Create a product usage guide/e-book and give a link back to the product page.

5. Get your product pages listed in social media websites.

6. Build a product related community and promote your product pages whenever possible.

7. Participate in product related forums and link back if found relevant.

8. Get your products reviewed by bloggers.

9. Start product information page within your website and link it to the product page

10. Add social Bookmarking tools in each product page.

11. Give a link back to the product page from other related product’s pages within your website

12. Email product page links to your customers whenever you add any new products or offer any discounts.


13. Create an RSS feed for the category pages. Make sure your users subscribe to the rss feeds. RSS have pretty much guaranteed delivery than email.

14. Get product category widgets; let your friends, relatives and others add them to their blog/websites.


15. Leave comments on other’s blog but make sure the comment is related to the product or category and give a link back.

16. Use a tell a friend script on each product pages.

17. Buy links to the category pages make sure you don’t buy irrelevant links.

18. Purchase ads and link the category/product pages in other people’s mailing lists and newsletter.

19. Make product videos and submit them to video sharing websites like youtube, metacafe, etc.

20. Place classified ads about your products in free or paid online classified websites.

12 Sure-Fire eCommerce retail SEO strategies

Although Search engines have proved to be the traffic generators for retail ecommerce websites, few retailers still remain unaware of this fact.



Almost 80% of retail websites are not Search engine friendly (Source: One up pub). It is astonishing to know that even large e-retail companies do not implement the basic strategies of eCommerce SEO. The meager amount of search engine traffic directed towards them is only due to the popularity of their brand name and/or brand-specific product search.


Regardless of the brand’s popularity, a well optimized ecommerce website will get the targeted traffic from well-known search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This is because 75% of consumers do online product research before they make online or offline purchases.


An ecommerce website with unique content will definitely rank higher in search engines than a site which uses content from the manufacturer websites or from well-established online retailers.


Steps to Increase Search Engine Traffic:

Important Note: Search engines rank a website based on Website Relevancy and Popularity Quality inbound links from other relevant websites (either from horizontal or vertical market). The following are some of the strategies of ecommerce retail SEO.


Product Web Page Title: Each web page should have a unique title. Including product name or a keyword associated with the product in the web page title is a traditional method, but is still considered as an important technique for search engine optimization. Example: Sony Cyber Shot Dsc-H9 – with 15x Optical Image Stabilization Zoom. (Maintain character limit up to 70-80 in the web page title)


Product Name (H1/H2): Placing keywords or key phrases in H1/H2 tags is another important technique of on-page optimization.

Image Tag: Search Engines are not smart enough to index images and graphics. So, adding a keyword or the product name in the ALT tag will result in optimization.

Product Page URL: Make sure that the product name is included in the URL of that specific product. Since most e-commerce websites generate pages on the fly, search engines find it difficult to crawl through these dynamic pages. Re-writing the URL to a static format is the best option and it will definitely have a good impact on optimization.

Meta Keywords: Use of Meta tags is considered to be an obsolete technique in search engine optimization. But make sure that limited and targeted keywords, that do not harm the website, are added.

Meta Description: Writing a small description in the Meta description space will boost the click through rate. The first sentence or two of the body copy from the web page can be used as the meta description content. And these will probably appear in the search engine result page if (and only if) the most searchable keywords are plugged in.

Keyword-rich Catalog: Most retailers fail to recognize the importance of content/catalog optimization and SEO copywriting. Unique product content integrated with searchable keywords is a very good technique for search engine optimization.

Need help in building unique and optimized content? Test our
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Quality Inbound Links: Link building is one of the fundamental strategies of eCommerce SEO. Engines rank a website based on how popular the website is. Popularity is determined on the basis of the number of quality inbound links that the website holds. Acquire keyword rich back links from websites that are relevant to your line of products or services. Do not go for link exchange with irrelevant websites.

Link Building Strategies:
Link exchange with relevance
Start a Blog on top selling products
Write articles about products
Product Press release
Submit to website directories
Post product features in discussion forum
Participate in social media…


Cross Link: Search engines prefer keyword rich text links. Linking from one product page to another will enhance search engine optimization and also help in cross-and up-selling products. It is always better to provide multiple ways to reach the final product page.

Feed Your Visitors: RSS feeds enable customers/visitors to know about new offers/products. Also try publishing RSS feed links in other related websites. This will help in search engine ranking.

Site Map: A site map is useful for users and search engines. A plain text keyword rich link sitemap facilitates search engine spiders to find all the pages/content of an e-commerce website.