Straight away i can see some SEO “experts” shouting you have obviously done something shady. We can honestly say we have not!
This is how we took an aged Exact Match Domain (EMD) for a client that had never had a website on, to the first page of Google within 4 weeks for a keyword with competition of 0.97 (1 being the highest). This was done for an ecommerce website but most tips can be applied to any kind of website.
- An exact match domain. Although the emphasis placed on an EMD by Google has gone down significantly it still will play some part in its ranking equation. The simple reason for this is it gives Google a very good idea what is likely to be on your website, and as long as what you have matches the domain name with quality content and good on page optimisation this will stay true and you will see the benefit of this.
Bing places a much larger emphasis on exact match domains and because of this we were ranking in the top 3 of Bing for our competitive term with 14 days!
- Aged domain. The domain was first registered back in early 2001 which is going to give some benefit over a fresh registration.
- Shopping cart used. We used Magento Community edition which is a fantastic free shopping cart, but does need tweaks to make it SEO friendly. One of the best investments you can make is Mageworx Ultimate SEO extension, best of all they will install and configure it for you using the best settings. This solves issues such as products appearing in multiple categories under a unique URL without a canonical tag to tell the search engines not to count them all as unique products. In short it prevents multiple duplicate content. I wont go into the extension in much more detail, only to say it should be part of your strategy when using Magento.
- Content. The customer outsourced the content of the website to us. We ensured that all content was well written, unique, designed to convert and friendly for the search engines. Unique well written content is an absolute must since the various Google Panda updates.
One of the key things to look for in a shopping cart is one that will let you easily place content on the category pages. This gives you a much better chance of your category pages ranking for your second tier keywords you are targeting. It is always best to write down before you start building your website and having content done the keywords you would like to target. We were primarily targeting One Primary keyword and 6 secondary keyword phrases via our category landing pages. Our product pages are also starting to pick up some product search traffic and long tail keyword phrase traffic.
- Links. Always a vital part of any campaign and yet so easy to go so wrong. We will always go for the harder to reach, quality and relevant one way back links. Many SEO companies will go for quantity over quality as it shows customers that they have been earning there money. Would you rather see a company has built 100 links of 5 for your £300? But our point has always been that quality comes before quantity. We gathered hard to get, highly relevant one way back links from aged authority sites and supplemented this with 4 of the best directory submissions (3 of which are paid and the other – Dmoz can take up to 6-9 months to be accepted).
-Best of the web
-Dmoz
-Business.com
-Joe any directory
As well as a few other topical directories.We did not build masses of product pages or tonnes of unique content, we simply followed the above strategy, always focussing on quality over quantity whatever we did.We are happy to show prospecting clients the website we performed our magic on, not only did we do Ecommerce SEO, but we also used our Web Design Cardiff team to design the Ecommerce website. Why not contact us to see how we can help you.