No online marketing strategy would be complete without careful consideration to SEO - search engine optimization. Below is the transcript of the video that will give your tips and walk you through the basics of SEO.
The biggest way that people misuse SEO is assuming that it’s a game or that it’s about outsmarting or tricking the search engines. It’s really not, it’s more about usability and creating a great experience.
So if you want to get started with some basic SEO, the first thing that I would recommend would be choosing a set of keywords for each page on your website. What you’re looking for is 3 to 5 keywords that are going to be unique to that page and incredibly relevant to the user. So to add keywords to your metadata, we’re going to go to Inventory, you’re going to go ahead and go to the category or the product that you’ve chosen your keywords for and that you need to add metadata to. And you’re going to scroll all the way down here to the Search Engine Optimization tab, and then you’re going to start filling stuff in.
So for the Category URL Text, it’s usually best practice to add your keywords here, too. But try to keep it pretty short. People are used to seeing short URLs. For this category, let’s just do “vintage belts”.
Your Meta Tag Title is going to be 156 pixels in length. It’s a common misconception that it’s a character count you’re looking for, but you’re actually looking for a pixel length. It averages out to about 55 characters, and the reason we go by pixel length and not character count is because your capital letters are naturally going to be a couple of pixels longer than a lowercase letter. You’re going to populate that title tag with the keywords you’ve chosen for the page. For this one I’m going to do, “Buy Vintage Belts Online”, and then maybe we sell leather belts so let’s say, “Affordable Leather Belts”.
For your meta description, that’s going to be 156 characters in length, which usually averages out to about 2 or 3 sentences. For this one, you’re actually speaking directly to the user, because this is the description that shows up in the search results underneath the link to the website, and it’s what encourages them to click on your website over somebody else’s. So you’re going to want to summarize what you can offer to the person, and create a really strong, clear call-to-action like, “Buy Now”, or “Shop Today”, or “Browse Our Products”.
Once you fill that out, you’ll notice that there is this tag underneath that’s called the Meta Keywords Tag, and you actually don’t need to worry about filling that out. We’ve left it in Volusion just because it’s confusing for some people if we remove it, but Google has been ignoring that tag since 2009, so it’s okay for us to ignore that tag, because anyone can view the source code for your website and see that tag, so we don’t want to give our competitors any easy access to our keyword strategy.
The other really important SEO basic that we’re going to talk about is on-page content. It’s incredibly important to have at least 150 words of on-page content for every single major page of your website. This includes your homepage, category pages, and product pages. So you’re going to take the same keywords that you were focusing on for the metadata, and you’re going to work them as naturally as you can into your on-page content. If one of my keywords was “Affordable Leather Belts”, then one way I might naturally incorporate that into a sentence is “We sell extremely high quality, yet affordable, leather belts.” You’re going to want to add your keywords about 2, maybe three times if you can. Always err on the side of the user and take them out when it feels unnatural.
So that about covers how we’re going to work our keywords into our metadata and our on-page content. If you need some more granular advice about how we actually select those keywords, then make sure to check out our next video on keyword research.