Unique content is key to generating links to a retail web site, and those links are critical to boosting a site’s position in search engine results, speakers explained Monday at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference.
Roughly 72% of how search engines generate their rankings is based on external factors external links to the site (66%) and social media (6%), according to Search Engine Optimization software provider SEOmoz. That means retailers have to prioritize how users see their sites when looking at their site design and give them a reason to link to their pages.
One way to garner links is to offer original content, such as a unique description or a special promotion on a product page. Similarly the site’s home page features anchor text the text that appears when a site visitor hovers over a hyperlink that includes some of the most popular search words, such as Buy Textbooks, Sell Textbooks that lead consumers to the site.
We want to capture the most popular search words so when students search where they can rent textbooks, we’ll be as high as we can in the results.
By paying heed to how the spiders from Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines crawled its site and indexed content, the online retailer redesigned its pages and improved its natural search results by eliminating unnecessary Flash elements on the home page that the spiders couldn’t read.
