SEO 101: Search Engine Optimization For Multi Vendor Stores, Demystified

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Apart from the content and the products that form a website, SEO can be the single most crucial factor behind driving sales to ecommerce platforms. Understandably, it makes sense for us to be spending a significant portion of our time on making sure that our website and its content, is compliant with SEO guidelines and is able to come up high on search results. In this series of articles, we will study what SEO actually is, and how it can help double or even treble the sales generated by ecommerce platforms.

Before moving further, we need to understand some basic facts about SEO. What after all, is SEO and just how important is the role it plays in ensuring that the content we have just produced,or the product we are trying to sell, can grab the maximum eyeballs over the web. Attracting customers is after all, the first step before an ecommerce platform makes sales.

The origins of SEO are doubtful, but we do understand that it evolved around the same time as Search Engines themselves did. However, over the past couple of decades or so, SEO has moved ahead by leaps and bounds and came to acquire an extremely significant place over the web.

As far as the importance of SEO is concerned, well, the 1st result on Google search receives almost 36 percent of total search engine traffic. In other words, if 100 people perform a Google search for a particular term, almost one third of them are likely to follow the first result. Of course, millions and even billions of Google searches are performed everyday. So, the links near the top get a huge amount of traffic. If we talk about results on the basis of their position on a particular page, results on the first page usually manage to snag around 92 percent of all traffic from the average search, with traffic dropping off by as much as 95 percent for Page 2.

SEO at its very base, is all about getting a website (or an e-commerce platform for our purpose) into the top of the search results — or at least, in the first page. Earlier, it used to be all about Keywords (the words for which the search is actually being performed). And people managed to learn SEO quickly so as to fool the system by stuffing their articles with the most popular keywords. Now though, things have changed and search engine algorithms are much, much smarter.

Today, our content has to be good, relevant and useful in order for it to make its way to the top. However, our ecommerce store could have the best content possible but stil not rank high in search results — and that is exactly where SEO comes in, giving us that extra push and causing a torrent of customers as traffic increases. What’s more, SEO Customized pages ensure that the traffic we get is highly targetted and as such, there is a high chance of leads turning into sales — or in other words, cause people visiting a website to actually buy the stuff they see before them.

All on its own, Magento is pretty good from a purely Search Engine Optimization Perspective. Hence, websites made using the Magento platform already have an edge over competition. With that said though, it should be borne in mind that a very significant portion of websites and particularly e-commerce stores spread across the world are all based on the same platform — Magento. So, gaining an edge over them in search rankings and visibility, which often equates to an edge in sales being accrued as well, requires staying on our toes with regards to the website Search Engine Optimization. Along this series of articles, we will talk about On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Long tail and short tail keywords and a lot more besides.

So now, you have two options, you can either stay with me for the rest of this series of articles and learn how to make the relevant Search Engine Optimization changes on your own — which while not too hard, will take up a significant bit of your time. Or, you can head over to extensions and purchase our super cool ULTIMATE XML SITEMAP and the VENDOR SEO SUITE ADDON , which promise to do the job better than almost anyone, without you needing to move a finger. Or even better, you can purchase and apply the extensions and then use the knowledge you gain from these articles, to improve even further.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series!

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