Our consulting team is often asked about what areas should be focused on when thinking about search for purchase driven or etail sites, as in today’s retail market companies really need to gain that competitive advantage. So, we’ve compiled this checklist as a foundation for what we like to call a ‘search friendly’ site.

The ultimate goal of search engine optimisation is to get Google to nod it’s head to your keywords, you can control this:

1) On-page Optimisation: keyword optimisations you make in your web page code

• Distinguish between “content” and “administrative” pages – then optimise only content pages.
• Choose just one keyword phrase per content page
• Use the keyword in your page’s file name; delimit with dashes
• Use keyword in the page title, “meta description” (twice if possible)
• Use keyword in a headline (use H1 or H2). Usually this is your page title.
• Use keyword several times in the body text where reasonable.
• Make sure your content is useful. Ok, search engines aren’t that smart, but visitors are.

2) Off Page Optimisation: The links coming into your site

• Submit your site to all the standard directories
• Submit article-style content to for syndication, making sure your content contains many keyword links back to your other content pages. This will get you hundreds of quality keyword links.
• Periodic press releases.
• Create a Google site map and submit it to Google.
• Create RSS feeds of your content and submit to various feed lists. This method will get you several hundred minor links per content page.
• Add a “link to this page” box on every content page to encourage deep-linking with the right keywords
• Locate quality sites linking to your competitor – contact the owner and suggest that they mention your site as an alternative option for their visitors. It’s amazing how many quality links you can get just by asking politely.

3) Site Optimisation: The navigation and linking structure you use across your site

• Don’t use both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com. Pick one or the other and stick to it
• Don’t link to your home page as index.html. Google only knows pages by link target
• Each content page should be linked to with one consistent keyword-friendly URL, and never with parameters

bad: http://firstrate.com.au/forum.php?topic=873736
good: http://firstrate.com.au /my-keyword-tp873736.html

• Link to each content page with static text links (not JavaScript, not Flash, or Images) and the anchor text of links should contain the target page’s keyword phrase.
  
  

bad link: “click here for split testing tools” - this just confuses the search engine
good link: “click here for split testing tools”

• Don’t link back to your home page with the link text “home”…
• Interlink between content pages from within paragraph text. These links seem to “count” more and will get you a bigger ‘nod of the head’ from Google.

Site Optimisation is the most powerful SEO area over which you have total control! It’s all about how you link your pages together. If done properly, it can have a significant impact.

These are only some suggestions to think about. If you have any questions about best practice SEO for etail, write us a comment below or send an email to experts@firstrate.com.au

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Hartford Technologies is a global specialist in online booking of refuse disposal services. Its online booking engine offers consumers value for money by offering the lowest available price for refuse disposal services.

First Rate was contracted by Hartford to assist with increasing website visitors and online sales in key markets, including the USA where they operate as bookadumpster.com. Search engine optimisation was chosen as a primary vehicle to accomplish objectives.

First Rate undertook extensive key phrase research to understand the market and recommended on-page changes to target valuable search terms. At the same time the website’s external link profile was reviewed, opportunities were identified and a linking strategy put in place.

Click here to download the case study.

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Download our award winning case study

The Power of Longtail: Focus Property

First Rate increases leading brand’s search engine rankings, powering their online business so that they rank above their competitors.

We have 30 consultants across Sydney, Perth and Auckland managing over 100 Google Adword Campaigns and generating over 1 million clicks a month and are proudly Google Analytics and Google Adwords certified.

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First Rate has taken the top prize for the IAB Australia Awards 2011, in the Organic Search (SEO) category for our client Focus Property.

The awards were held last night in Sydney and we’re all stoked to have claimed the top prize amongst a high calibre of entrants. Judges commented that our entry was

“a very well laid out entry with a nice focus on the right aspects of SEO. The point of differentiation is that they ticked criteria for SEO but went above and beyond focusing on Longtail strategy.”

Award Winning Case Study: The Power of Longtail, Focus Property

The state of play

Focus Property is Sydney’s leading property management firm. Currently managing over a 1/4 billion dollars worth of residential real estate with in Sydney’s CBD. Focus Property enlists services such as sales, letting and property management.

Our client operates in a highly competitive market with many large and established players, such as Ray White, LJ Hooker, Run Property and the Carrington Group. The competitors had strong presence in not only the property management segment but also the sales and letting segments.  Focus Property realised that an increasing amount of new business was being generated through the web as buyer behavior evolved, especially through the search engines.

The Strategy

First Rate was engaged to help improve search engine visibility and drive qualified organic leads and increase footprint. While there was a significant traffic available for head terms such as “property management”, these would not be best for converting into high quality leads. This is because they were generic and at the research phase of the buying cycle rather than being brand focused in their search queries.

First Rate discovered Focus Property had service offerings in 118 suburbs that had sufficient volume to blanket the long tail search market.  Long tail local keywords were focused on because collectively the volume of these keywords was large and anticipated that conversion rate and lead quality would be greater. This was consistent with focus on generating high quality traffic. Personalized landing pages were created for the target suburbs, giving more personalized pages and relevant content. Suburb pages were created and optimized for terms such as “<suburb> property management” and variants of that. This would then result in high quality localized leads.

Tactics

Content would be needed to target the identified keywords for example, “Bondi Property Management” and no 1 for virtually all terms relating to suburb name, property management as above. Working with Focus Property, we created pages for each of the 118 target suburbs, containing information and photos specific to each suburb Information was sourced from a number of locations such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This created rich content for the search engines, as well as creating a relevant, personalized landing page experience for prospects as originally forecast.

Results

We saw not only a significant increase in unique visits and visits from organic search but also an increase in ranking for head and secondary terms securing the head term as ranking number 1.

• In 12 months traffic jumped from 481 visits per month in Dec 09 to over 3300 unique visits per month in Dec 10.
• Monthly visits from non-paid, non-brand organic search increased 15 fold (from roughly 110 visits in Dec ’09 to over 1,700 visits in Dec ’10).
• #1 ranking in Google for head term “property management” achieved in early 2011.
• Top 5 rankings for a variety of secondary terms.



Get in touch with our team for more information about the power of longtail or SEO.

experts@firstrate.com.au

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Today the IAB announced the list of finalists for the inaugral IAB awards. We’re proud to say that First Rate were named as finalists in the Search Marketing (Organic Search) category for our submission “The Power of Longtail: Focus Property”.

This is the first year that has seen the ‘Search’ category split into Paid vs Organic with the increase in entries for the category over recent years. This year also marks a jump in entries of 19% from the previous year, and with the awards ceremony already nearly at capacity, it’s proving to be a highly competitive event.

Our team devised a strategy that not only saw a significant increase in unique visits and visits from organic search but also an increase in ranking for head and secondary terms securing the head term as ranking number 1.

We’ll post a case study once winners are announced so stay tuned.

Congrats to the First rate Sydney team who worked on the project and to the other finalists!

Click here for the complete list of finalists

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