Making Ecommerce successful these days is a pain in the neck. While on one hand Google tries to be the one and only affiliate on the web, Amazon’s tentacles have reached far and wide, leaving very little for others. What’s more, the search engines are becoming increasingly eager in removing commercial sites from the results as they want to replace them with their own ads plus shopping programs. And on top of all that, the search results now focus more on content than products.

However, here are a few tips that should help you conquer the competition by way of   updating your SEO as fast as possible so that you can reap the harvest from the beginning of 2014.

Create Engaging, Interactive, User-Friendly Website with Lowest Load-Time

Apart from staying relevant in search results, you need to pay more attention to your visitors which tantamount to boosting your conversion rate as high as possible. And here are the ways of doing it:

• Attractive, not over attractive site design will attract the attention of visitors
• Interactive elements will keep them interested in it
• Increased user engagement such as participation in forums or other community-building activities will make the visitor feel free about going through the web pages
• Low load time is yet another attractive feature for any website

Keep Panda Updates in Mind

Remember, eCommerce sites are more susceptible to Panda updates that are mostly content-centric. As a matter of fact, Panda considers the whole of Web as if it consists only of blogs and content created for providing information and entertainment, whereas most eCommerce sites are commercial in nature. Therefore:

• Refrain from using stereotyped product description provided by the manufacturer or cloaked in commercial clothing. The idea is to provide unique content.
• Go for user generated content, if possible. Otherwise, you may non-index your product pages and focusing just on creating informative content on your category pages.
• Alternatively, start using blogs. Google loves blogs and so you win.

Go Mobile If You Want To Survive

Yes, that’s the way the wind blows now-a-days. According to Forbes, more than 20% of online shopping sessions are now happening on mobile devices. At the same time, the vast majority of online stores simply aren’t optimized for use on mobile devices. They are difficult to read, the buttons are too small, and users are frustrated. So, get your optimized so that navigation can be a pleasure not a hindrance.

Keywords Are No More Your Real Friends

Even though it is an acceptable practice to use your keyword in your title tag, but beyond that you better forget about it. Squeezing keywords into subheads was never a good idea before, neither is it any good now while keyword density is something that has gone with the wind.

Leverage Social Media to Improve Your Strategy

According to social commerce firm 8thBridge, the eCommerce leaders over the past year have fallen into one of three categories:

Those that have found a way to make their websites deeply social in a way that makes users want to engage with the site and share from it.

“In transition” sites that do well on all social platforms and use a variety of strategies.

Companies that have a knack for going viral on social networks and drawing in referral traffic as a result.

Success with social media is about more than putting up a social signpost. Successful strategies encourage reviews, community, and photo sharing.

Remain Penguin-Friendly

The simplest way of doing that entails the following activities.

• While obtaining links, give more importance to clicks than on keywords
• Use as many kinds of links as you can
• Do not try to obtain links from sites that exist only to give links
• Monitor your link profile
• Utilize Social Media to build relationships that naturally turns into links

Conclusion

Even though the search engines are not in good terms with commercial content and Amazon, as earlier stated, already has a massive chunk of the market share, more and more consumers are heading fast towards eCommerce than ever before. So, there is no reason as to why you will not be successful if you optimize your site by following the tips given above. All the best for a flourishing 2014 eCommerce business year.