Friends, family, business acquaintances, friends-of-friends, .et .al are constantly asking me (and I assume other ecommerce merchants and marketers get like queries), “What’s the trick that gets my business web site highly ranked at Google (or any other search engine)?” Today I am going to reveal this secret to the world. (And from now on I will simply forward this article to all who ask me this question.)

There are three steps and they must be executed in this order:

1. Be a good business.

This step has nothing to do with computers or new technology. It has everything to do with good products, competitive prices, responding to the needs of your customers, good communication with customers/employees/vendors, flexibility, treating employees well (among other reasons, as a model for how you want your staff to treat your customers), fair policies, and the myriad of product and service issues that make a good business apparent to all who visit it (on or off line). This is the most important step. Your ultimate objective will fail, if this step is not followed.

2. Create a good web site.

This step has nothing to do with directly striving to optimize your site for the search engines (SEO). It has everything to do with building a site that is attractive, easy to navigate, loads quickly, is free of irrelevant ads/banners/pop-ups (and like garbage), contains lots of good general information relevant to your product and expertise, etc. This site includes good images, good product descriptions, a good site search tool, an easy to use shopping cart, options for the customer to purchase from or communicate with the merchant in the way that he/she prefers (e.g. online, via telephone, fax, mail), etc. This site reflects and reinforces the fact that number one is in place.

3. Do nothing, be patient, and continue to improve #1 and #2.

Here’s why: The search engines (Google and Yahoo for example) are in the business of returning good, relevant search results to their site visitors. In other words, the business of being a good search engine is to execute “#1″ and “#2″ above. In the arena of ecommerce, the search engine business succeeds when it helps its visitors find good merchants with good sites. Their formula for doing this successfully is improving all the time. [Trying to crack the algorithm is waste of time anyway; you might as well be trying to get into Fort Knox.]

More importantly, this formula is predicated on how successfully an ecommerce site is being appreciated by the Internet audience. Examples include how many “good quality” links are there to your site (good quality means links from other good businesses and good sites). Or, how many search engine visitors click through to your site when your link is returned on a page along with your competitors (for example: the Google visitor searches “cat t-shirts for sale.” Ten merchants line up on the Google page returned for this search criteria, each with two lines of text. Visitors like your two lines of text better than the other ones and therefore click through to your site more than to your competitors’ sites. This “vote” likely raises your ranking.) The search engine is looking for the same thing a customer is looking for i.e. good businesses [#1] with good sites [#2]. If you are not this, you may be able to trick the results for a while, but the formula will change eventually and weed you out. There is a lot more to the formula, but I think you get my point-don’t bother all that much with it per se. Instead, work at being a better business and making a better site; that’s the means to accomplish the ends.

There you have it, three steps for achieving good natural search engine rankings (that in fact are implemented in two steps). Not incidentally, the strategy for ecommerce success is the same.

http://www.VillageHatShop.com

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