Tag Archives: google

SEO: Can Local Searchers Find Your Stores?

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How do you optimize your site’s distribution for search queries specifying a location? (for example, the search query, “Mountain View crafts store”) The solution—individual URLs for your store’s locations. “Without individual URLs for individual store locations, the store information can’t be indexed and returned in organic search results.” Search results (greatly impacted by the URLs of the results themselves) are based on their relevance to the search query at hand. Even if your online store’s “location page” includes text related to its individual addresses, when those addresses aren’t given their own URLs, their chances of popping up at the top of a SERP (search engine results page) are diminished as a direct result of their seemingly “irrelevant” URL.

To read more about how to optimize your locations pages, read Jill Kocher’s article, SEO: Can Local Searchers Find Your Stores?

-Christopher Lin, Lexity

The Beginner’s Guide to Integrating SEO and Social Media

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Fact: Being retweeted helps your online store’s search engine ranking.

Fact: Being linked to on Facebook helps your online store’s search engine ranking.

Venn Diagram of SEO and Social Media Integration

Image courtesy of onlinebusiness.volusion.com

In a recent article for onlinebusiness.volusion.com, Matt Winn runs through several tips and strategies regarding just how to tie together your SEO efforts and social media marketing (7 to be exact). For starters, you should 1) make it easy for people to find/share your content and 2) encourage people to share and engage with your content. The power of the “social share button” has become widely known and widely undebatable. However, it’s power should not be limited to its presence on your page. Actively encourage users to share content – whether it be for discounted merchandise as a reward, or as simply an aspect of professed customer loyalty.

To improve your search engine ranking, brainstorm creative ways with which to use your social media presence to promote customer evangelism. Tying together your SEO efforts and social media requires that you produce “good” content (content that customers want to share).

Short and sweet, visit Matt Winn’s article, The Beginner’s Guide to Integrating SEO and Social Media, to learn more.

Reading Level and SEO

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Jesper Astrom (@JesperAstrom, jesperastrom.com) has uncovered an incredibly useful piece of insight… Did you know that Google categorizes the text on your website from a level of basic to intermediate and advanced? Attempting to rank the most relevant content in the top of the search engine, Google provides search results that directly relate to the text category (or rather the ‘reading level’ of your website–basic, intermediate and advanced) and the reading level of a search query.

If a user can’t understand the search results that Google provides, the search results are useless.

The important thing, here, however isn’t the need to immediately go and change the ‘reading level’ of your website and its content. Instead, you need to know the reading levels of the demographic of your preferred/converting visitor. For SEO to be at its best for your online store, you need to evaluate whether or not the text of your website matches up to the reading levels of your ‘ideal or preferred customer.’

Simple enough… but there’s more! Visit Jesper Astrom’s article, Reading Level and SEO, and you’ll see just what we mean. Astrom’s intuition about “reading levels” is notable enough.

-Christopher Lin, lexity.com