Welcome to the Effective Ecommerce Podcast and in this episode we’re going to talk about SEO basics. Specifically, we’re going to give an overview of what SEO is what that means a quick note it’s search engine optimization that’s what it stands for and then we’re going to talk about on-page SEO so let’s just jump right into it there are two major camps of SEO there’s on-page SEO and then there’s off page SEO so we’re going to talk about later in this episode on-page SEO and then in part two the next episode we’ll talk about off page SEO which is also called link building so getting off page SEO means just basically getting links to point to your website getting other web sites to link to your website so before we get into on-page SEO it’s probably helpful to know a little bit about what is SEO what does it mean and why does it work the way it works so SEO search engine optimization is basically just trying to rank higher up in google for the search results so whatever you’re trying to rank for I let’s say for instance for me for my dance clothing company I might try to rank number one for dance shorts I’m not currently ranking number one for dance shorts but just as an example I’m that might be a keyword when someone a keyword is something that when someone types into Google that might be a keyword that I want to rank number one in Google for dance shorts so how do you do this well I think it’s important to understand what is Google is Google some kind of a human that sits back and picks what sites the most relevant not really and I think to understand this we got to go back to the beginning at the beginning of time at the beginning of Google’s time all Google was and it still is just a computer it’s just a computer that has an algorithm and an algorithms like a fancy word for a formula it’s a it’s a formula that figures out which website is the most relevant to what searches so how does it do it does it in a lot of different ways but one of the things it does is it goes on that website and sees how often that keyword shows up so let’s compare two different websites one that has the dance shorts the word dance short on a bunch of different pages and another one that the word dance shorts doesn’t appear anywhere well Google automatically knows one is related to dance shorts and one is not now let’s take two identical pages that both have the word dance shorts all all throughout it there they’re almost there exactly the same website how does Google know which one should rank higher well it’s more complicated than this now but in their early days what Google would do it’s basically a popularity system Google would see how many links are coming in to that website and more importantly the power of those links what I mean by the power is are those links coming from a reputable website and the way Google would do this is it basically sees that all right let’s say there’s a link there’s two different links one coming from a University which is a pretty reputable website if you’re a university and you’re linking out to a website that’s pretty reputable and that probably means that universities don’t just give out backlinks now let’s say it’s someone’s you know member in like the s those Geocities web pages if it’s a Geo City web page or a really new web page linking out Google doesn’t put a lot of weight on that so Google basically uses a formula to figure out how many links are coming to your website and how important are those links so it’s a popularity contest so what you want to do is obviously get links from not just a lot of different sources but one relevant sources so if I’m trying to rank my dance shorts page I want to get links from other pages that are somehow related to dance and dance shorts because if it’s from a random let’s say I got a link from a air-conditioning website that doesn’t hold a lot of weight Google’s going to be look at that and be confused and say well why is this air-conditioning website linking to then linking to a dance shorts page it doesn’t mean as much is if a dance blog or dance studios are linking to my dance shorts page so basically there’s two box aspects there’s the on-page aspect where Google goes in and tries to figure out what is this website about and then there’s the popularity aspect and where it looks and it crawls all these different websites and tries to basically see where all these links are pointing and it counts up how many links are pointing to you and it figures out how important those links are so if you have two identical websites both equally as much about dance charts the word appears just as much but one of them has a hundred links from like top level web sites and the other one has just ten links from top level web sites the one with a hundred links is going to be higher up and Google so this can get a lot more complicated but that is the over simplified version right there so you have two jobs one to make your website is easy for Google to read and make it very black-and-white what your website is about and then two is to get as many links back from reputable sources as you can you don’t want to get links from a bunch of crappy websites Google actually may penalize you for that so the first one is called on-page SEO it’s all your SEO on your website and you have full control over this and this is really important you’re dumb if you do not do this and do as good of a job as possible that’s what we’re gonna be talking about in this episode the second one is off page SEO it’s the link building and we’ll talk about that in the second episode we’ll give you a ton of tips on how to get quality backlinks so let’s dive in to on-page SEO before we get into that it’s important to understand what keywords are and I’m going to use this term a lot and if you’re not familiar with the term keywords it’s basically just what are people typing into Google to find things so in my example someone might type in dance shorts so that’s the keyword that I’m trying to rank for someone might instead type in red dance short and you can figure out what keywords you want to target and the way to do this and this is really important from a very beginning stage right a list of    things that when people search in Google you want your website to come up and there is multiple aspects to this one how often are people actually going to be searching that that’s the first thing and – how is the competition and you can find out both of these things I’d say the first step is if you let’s say use the keyword Dan shorts once again type in dan short’s into Google see what comes up see how big those companies are and chances are you’re not gonna be able to rank for Dan shorts it’s very competitive we have there’s a lot of companies with multi-million dollar budgets that I just I can’t compete with so instead of trying to rank for something like dance shorts I might want to try to rank for red dance shorts and a few Google red dance shorts there’s not a lot of competition and there’s not a lot of people specifically targeting red dance shorts so I’ll make a list of all the different keywords that I want to rank for and then I the GU the keyword tool that Keyword tool to go on and try to figure out how much search volume those words are using because you don’t want to try to rank for a keyword that no one’s searching for so I might think that lycra read dan short’s is something super popular and everyone’s searching for it but then I use the keyword tool and I realize no nobody cares about lycra or maybe yeah let’s say like err they don’t care about lycra read dan short’s what they search for is spandex read dance shorts so you’re gonna use the keyword tool also to figure out is the wording that you’re using correct because maybe people you think of it as like rub but other people think of it as spandex another example of this is we have a high waisted dance short originally where we were gonna call it a fold-over dance short because the elastic high waist band can be folded over turns out less people search for fold-over dance short than they do for high waist and short and the competition was about the same so I chose that that is my keyword so once you have a keyword that’s great but how do you actually utilize it and there is a bunch of different things we’re gonna talk about the first thing actually I will mention is you want to include it in the content of your page so if it’s a product for instance make sure it’s in the product description make sure you say something like these high waisted dance shorts are perfect for X Y & Z and you want it to be natural don’t try to force it they they used to do a lot of forcing of keywords it’s called keyword stuffing but Google is since caught into that caught onto that it used to be that you could just put a ton of keywords and Google would rank you for a bunch of different stuff it’s not like that anymore so if you’re trying to rank an article for instance instead so let’s say I wrote an article about the best high waisted dance shorts I want to make sure that the word high waisted dance shorts not only appears in the title but it piers appears throughout the actual body of the text the next thing is the meta title and meta description and if you have Shopify for instance you can set this very easily most that most the shopping cart platforms out there make it very easy to set the meta title and the meta description but what the meta title in Meta Description is the basically the Google search result a lot of times you’ll see this as at SERP ICRP search engine result page but so if you type in dance shorts you see a list of a bunch of different sites that you can go to the blue title is the meta title and then the black description is the meta description and you want to make sure you include your keywords in there but not only do you need to include your keywords in there you also need to make it appealing because Google looks at how often people click on it so this is your ad this is a free advertisement and you want to make people click on it so an example that I might do is have high waisted and shorts handmade or let’s say available in  color ‘s handmade in the USA and I believe you have a hundred sixty characters I might be wrong might be  somewhere like that you can find that number somewhere online so you have a limited amount of characters and you don’t want it to get truncated you don’t want it to be longer than that because then you’ll get the three little dots at the end and that’s not good for a user experience so if I do the high-waisted so the reason I do high-waisted dance short’s  plus colors handmade in the USA and one of them is high-waisted and shorts is my that’s my keyword so someone is searching for high waisted and short and they see a meta title with the word high waisted an insurer very likely to click on it and Google knows it’s very relevant to that search the next thing is  plus colors people are naturally attracted to numbers when you when you see a bunch of text and you see some numbers your eyes naturally are attracted to that because it’s different it hits a different part of your brain and same thing with the plus sign I used the plus sign because it’s different than numbers it’s well it’s different than letters and it’s different than numbers and it just stands out it looks special it’s eye-catching then I do the handmade in the USA in all caps and you know you you dot s dot a because it’s once again it’s eye-catching and it invokes some kind of a value the -plus colors invokes a value in the handmade in the USA has a value so it’s an advertisement people are more likely to click on that same thing in your description you want to follow the same rules write it as if you were paying $10 a click for this and or you know maybe $100 a month you had to spend $100 a month for this advertisement on Google how would you write it use the same amount of care because if you’re let’s say in third place for highways to dance shorts and Google sees that everybody keeps clicking on your Google search result then they’re going to eventually put you at the number one spot because they’re assuming that people are more interested in your you’re basically page so that’s the meta title and Meta Description next up let’s talk about header tags these are the h tags and h tags if you’re trying to rank a page for high waist and shorts once again you’re going to want to use that is an h tag now Shopify you can I believe you can set it you can you can do this in HTML to basically it’s the less than sign yeah less than sign h and then a greater than sign you type in high-waisted dance shorts and then you do the less than sign / H or ya I think / h greater than sign it you can find tutorials for this online it’s very easy to do I know that might have sounded complicated to some people but literally I told you exactly what to do step by step very easy to do and Shopify and other hosting platforms make it even easier so the reason these are important is because when you’re writing an article or you’re writing a any kind of a website page the header tag is basically what is that whole article about and so Google minds that data and adds extra weight on to that so if you had a product page about high-waisted and shorts you’d want to make sure you have an h tag of high-waisted and shorts if it’s a article on the best dance shorts let’s just say the best dance shirts you don’t want the h tag to be the best dance shorts and aesthetically this is also true because if people are looking for a article about the best dance shorts they want the title of the article to be best dance shorts so that’s pretty simple you can use h tags and then so you’d have one h tag which might just be the best dance shorts and then you can have different h tags which are like sub headers and the first one might be the number one products so number one be dancer dance shorts number two a competitor brand dance shorts and these would all be h tags because visually once again it’s appealing and that’s just naturally how people kind of structure articles so Google Minds that data for information next up a link structure so the structure of your website is also very important so let’s go use be dance bar again as an example so we have B dance for calm I might have a category page of all our different dance shorts that should be Bdancewear.com/danceshorts and the reason is Google will look at the link structure for that and use it actually this is more URL structure which I’ll talk about in a second so I think link structure what I’m talking about that is where are the links on your website what pages on your website are you pointing to most often for instance I have a header image on Bdancewear.com that it’s a if you click on the link to it takes you to a color page where it shows a list of all of our colors that page ranks very high for me because Google knows that I have a link to it right smack dab on my homepage it must be very important so let’s do an example let’s say I have one page that’s a high waist and short product page and one page that is just a regular dance short product page and for the high waist and short product page I put every single page of my website has a link going to it Google is going to say this must be very important he must be trying to push this and this must be the most important page on his website so there’s this idea of SEO juice and every time you put a link from your one page to a different page whether it’s your own website or a different website you’re given away some SEO juice so I don’t know if I’m explaining it properly but let’s say Google checks a website and sees that every single page is linking to one of your product pages it knows that that’s your most important product and it’s going to give more of your SEO juice we’ll call it to that product page and you get the way you would get quote-unquote SEO juice is the more let’s say you have  links coming in to your website and they’re all pointing to your home page and then on your home page you have a link to one of your high waist and shorts a product page Google is going to say wow this high waist and short product must be very important because this one page that has a bunch of links going to it the only link linking out to a different page is linking to this certain high waist and short page so not going to talk about this too much but the structure your website is very important the link structure specifically and you’ll probably want some kind of a sitemap or something like that that has a link to all the different pages on your website so Google can easily index and find all those pages so next up is URL structure and that’s what I was talking about at the beginning of this conversation or in the beginning I was talking about earlier be dancewear com would be my home page now be dancer calm slash dance shorts would be the category page for Bdancewear.com/dance shorts anyways you get what I’m saying that page would be a product page and Google would very easily be able to look at the URL and see oh ok this high waist and shorts page is a sub page of the category dance shorts so you want to think about that when you when you’re writing out your website the URLs and the keywords and the putting keywords in the URL is very important so definitely don’t neglect that aspect of it next up is image SEO and I’m going to actually add one other thing we’ll talk about I’m just thinking about this as I go Page Speed we’ll talk about in a second as well but image SEO you want to make sure all the images on your website are properly SEO and there’s a few different steps to do this one title the image something related to whatever keywords you’re going after so once again I’m using an example the high waisted and shorts I’m going to save that image is high waisted dance shorts dot jpg and then I might do high-waisted and shorts back view dot jpg and Google will look at the file image name and try to figure out what it’s about the second thing it will do is look at the alt text or you can put in HTML the title of the image and there’s tutorials I have on my YouTube channel first off I have videos on all this stuff on my YouTube channel it’s effective e-commerce if you just go to YouTube and type in effective e-commerce you’ll be able to find that out but I have step-by-step tutorials on how to do all of this an image SEO is very important it’s very easy to set the alt image in Shopify I believe it’s just a field that you type in so I would do my image name is high waisted dance shorts and then I would set the alt image tag to high-waisted dance shorts and you can even do this for multiple call you could every time you upload a new image I could have read high-waisted and shorts and put the alt image tag also is read very easy to do but a lot of people neglect this I think it’s it helps Google let you know let them know what your website is about and Google is notoriously bad at figuring out what’s in an image they’re very good at figuring out the text on a website and what are websites about based on the text but they’re not very good at figuring out what in image is about they’re getting a lot better but they’re still not very good at figuring out the contents of an image next up another thing that people are Google looks at is Page Speed and when you someone load your website how fast it load loads not only helps them because the faster it loads the more likely they are to stay on the website the more likely they are to use it and purchase it just creates a better user experience but the second part of it is Google rewards you because they know this they know that a faster website leads to a happier customer think about it’ll the last time you clicked on a link to a website and it took three four seconds to load doesn’t sound like that long but in the time the age of the Internet three to four seconds is way too long and there’s a huge there was a study done about the conversion rates of a website and for every like  milliseconds or something like that the extra that it took the conversion rate dropped off significantly so do everything you can to try to get your page speed faster at Google I think if you do type in Page Speed test into Google they have some different they have they have a tool that you can use and you can run your website and it’ll tell you how fast the speed of your website is but also how to improve it so for instance maybe you’re not properly compressing images if you just upload an image without any kind of compression then your website’s going to look slow you could do you can even do lossless compression and it won’t result in a negative crappy image but it’ll make it so the image is just better conformed for web sites a lot of times people will take an image that’s really big shrink it down using HTML and it still needs the website still needs to load for a user that really big image which takes extra time because a bigger image takes longer to download but it only ends up resulting in a small image that the user sees and you can fix this all this can be fixed check out I think it’s page speed test google that and you’ll find out all this information so the last thing I want to talk about for on page is Rich Snippets actually there’s probably one more thing after this so let’s go over rich tip is first Rich Snippets is a fancy term but you see this a lot of times in Google when you see fans when you type in for instance highways to the insurance once again to use that example you’ll see on my website we have reviews and that is available in Google there’s other Rich Snippets there’s other examples I’m blanking on all the different ones right now but anytime you see something in Google that is a little out of the ordinary it’s probably a rich snippet so from my product high-waisted and shorts we have reviews I think it’s a four and a half star review and those four and a half stars show up in Google which is awesome which makes for a better advertisement it makes for a better search result for you which means more people are going to click on it which means Google is more likely to put your page higher up so definitely get those Rich Snippets on your product pages and there’s a bunch of different tools that you can do that within Shopify I think you can also probably do it manually I’m going to be wrong on that but there’s a bunch of different plugins that can do that the last thing I want to talk about is content Google really cares how much information you have if you only have five pages they assume that you’re not that serious you’re probably not that big of a website but if you have hundreds of hundreds of pages of great articles they’re much more likely to rank you higher up in Google so you definitely want to have a lot of really good high-quality content and not only are you by having a lot of content Google knows that you’re a reliable website and they’re more likely to rank you higher but then that’s more opportunities for you to rank for different articles so I might do one best high-waist to dance shorts I do an article about that then I might do another article that is best regular dance charts another article that’s the best dance pants another article where I interview some dance studio and just um the more options more content pieces I have the more opportunities I have to rank number one in Google for something the more traffic I can get and the more traffic I can get it’s kind of this like awesome cycle where the more traffic you get the higher up Google’s going to put you and then you get higher up you even get higher up and it just goes on and on so definitely consider how you can release as much content as possible and you can even hire people I’ve hired people before using sites like Fiverr definitely want to check their work you can also find people for pretty cheap you can find students to write articles for you it’s a great option if you have someone that wants to do an internship for you could say yeah sure you can do an internship for me just write articles in fact I want to actually reach out if anybody’s listening this podcast and is looking for some extra help I’m looking for someone to be an intern and I would basically trade my consulting I would help you get started with an online store in exchange for an intern I’m specifically looking for someone basically just to watch my videos and write articles about them because I need more content more text on my effective e-commerce website so if you’re listening to this and you are interested in getting some extra consulting help maybe you’re a student looking to start a new website or maybe you’re you know whatever any number of things I think this is a great opportunity for somebody because basically I’m going to give you free consulting in exchange for watching my videos and writing out articles which will help you remember the content so it’s a win-win situation here so if you’re interested in that reach out to me Travis at effective e-commerce dot-com I’d be happy to help mentor you in exchange for some work but I want to wrap this up here I’m going to go over the list one more time one do you find what keywords you want to rank for do your keyword research and you look up the keyword tool in Google next up meta titles Meta Description make sure you set your meta title and your meta description after that have h tags and h tags your header tags after that the link structure of your website what pages are is your website linking to the most and how can you best utilize that space remember it’s a voting system every vote is or every link is a vote Eve on your own website so that’s very important URL structure makes your keywords appear in your URL and make sure it’s clean beautiful that people would be able to tell what each page is about under like under what category so once again Bdancewear.com/dance pants then I would also do Bdancewear slash dance shorts slash booty shorts like all my shorts would be under slash dance shorts and it sounds more complicated than is I have is much easier to explain this in a video than it is in a podcast go to YouTube go to effective e-commerce and just search SEO search SEO effective e-commerce I’m going to see all my different videos on that image SEO make sure all your images are properly se owed you want the jpg to be titled with whatever you’re trying to rank for and then you want to set the alt tag is well to whatever you’re trying to rank for page speed make sure your page is loading as fast as possible this is a double benefit here because not only then will it help you rank higher in Google it will also help you with the customer experience people want a fast website Rich Snippets look into Rich Snippets definitely get reviews on your Google search results I think that’s very important and last but not least content get is much content out there as you can email me Travis that effectiveecommerce.com if you’re interested in writing articles about my videos in exchange for a little mentorship and if you want to win a free one alone consulting session all you got to do is go to iTunes leave a five star review it’s so important five star reviews are is important to me as Amazon reviews as actually so we just talked about the Rich Snippets the reason it’s so important is the more five-star reviews I have just like your product the more five-star reviews your product has the more likely people are to buy it the more five-star reviews this podcast says the more listeners I’m going to get the more listeners I get the better content the more time I can put to this the better guests that I can get on this show so that’s why it’s important go to iTunes leave that -star review and as a thank you I’m randomly every month I’m picking someone from there to give a free 30-minute one-on-one consulting session win with I actually picked an extra person this month just because I want to try to really get those five-star reviews going I might do that again I’m you know I really need to get that number up there so many Foy I think I think it was Murph I Studios and I said it in the last episode there was a mic the manager I believe was the name Mike the manager both you guys email me Travis at Effectiveecommerce.com to claim your free one-on-one consulting session thank you so much for listening in this episode I do have a checklist for starting an online store and for it basically SEO all your SEO on page stuff you if you want to check out my checklist good Effectiveecommerce.com slash success pack if you’re watching this in YouTube there’s a link in the upper left-hand corner if you’re listening to this on the podcast just go to effective Effectiveecommerce.com you probably will find it just by going to Effectiveecommerce.com or you go to Effectiveecommerce.com slash success pack and you can get my checklist for SEO it’ll walk you through everything you need to know and I have links to my YouTube videos on there as well but it’ll walk you through everything you need to know about SEO and make sure you don’t forget anything because it’s easy to forget one of these ten items and then you’re just not as optimized as you could be it SEO is free to do especially on-page SEO it’s so easy you shouldn’t hire someone you should just do it yourself if you do want to hire someone I do have some different consulting agencies that I work with I can give you their reference information but on-page SEO unless you’re just scrapped for time and you have a big budget you should just do it yourself it’s no one’s going to take as much care as you will so do this on page SEO yourself to wrap up here effective e-commerce search it on iTunes leave that five star review for a chance to win a free 30-minute one-on-one consulting session email me if you’re interested in mentorship and go on Effectiveecommerce.com to get the success pack thank you guys for listening this episode I got new episodes every Monday and Thursday I hope you enjoyed it and if you did send me an email let me know have a good rest your week and I will see you guys on the next episode

• There are two major categories of SEO On Page SEO and Off Page SEO
• On page SEO is a must do for all stores and it is basically making it easy for google to read what is on your page, off page SEO is all about getting as many high quality links to your site, preferably from related sites
• This Video will focus on on page SEO as it is the foundation that you need to build for your online store
• On Page SEO has 7 Main Parts

1. Keywords
2. Keyword Research
3. Meta Title and Meta Descriptions
4. Header Tags
5. Link Structure
6. URL Structure
7. Image SEO
8. Page speed
9. Rich Snippets
   1. Reviews etc.
10. Content