22
Aug
How To Dominate The First Page Of Your Brand’s Google Search
Have you ever Googled your name or your business’ name? If you saw any random results unrelated to you and your business, you might be thinking that there is no way to knock those pages off the front page.
Luckily, BrandYourself.com analyzed over 130K users and millions of Google results to showcase how people look in Google and which profiles rank the highest. And what they’ve found could help you and your business own the front-page of Google.
Profiles that you should create for you and your personal brand today:
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn profiles ranked higher than any other network
- WordPress: If you’re looking to create a blog, use WordPress. It outranked Tumblr and Blogger.
- Vimeo: While your videos may get more views because of Youtube’s popularity, Vimeo ranks higher in Google.
- Flickr – If you want your photos to show up on the first page, use Flickr over other options like Photobucket.
21
May
The Content Marketing Explosion
Even before the area of eCommerce, marketing and sales departments used content marketing to sell their products through customer testimonials, pamphlets, flyers, etc. The written word has always helped businesses educate the buyer and now that all of that information is easily accessible and sharable online, the power of content marketing has exploded! Customers are empowered to research your products and business on their own instead of you having to find them on a street corner & pass information along.
The new power content marketing holds caused marketers to term a new name for the content marketing revolution – “inbound marketing.” Inbound marketing uses content to “making yourself easy to be found and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value”. In outbound marketing ( like flyers, pamphlets, advertising etc) you are having to go after your customers, hunt them down and interrupt whatever a potential customer is doing to pitch them, essentially outbound efforts bothers customers in hopes that your products appeal to the customer enough for them not to be annoyed. Inbound marketing helps your site be found by pre-qualified interested customer, customers come to you. As Hubspot puts it, “you need to set your website up like a “hub” for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through search engines, the blogosphere, and social media.”
The infographic below shares some interesting statistics about the shift in online marketing from outbound to inbound like 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing! If you need help getting your content, blog, or social media up to par, remember the experts at 3dcart are more than happy to help. Read more on SEO & content services here: http://www.3dcart.com/ecommerce-marketing-services.html
25
Apr
5 Reasons To Host Your Blog
In yesterday’s SEO webinar, I received several questions on whether it is better host your blog on your store’s domain or on a hosted platform like WordPress, Blogger or Tumblr.
So which is better? While there are some pros to using Tumblr like gaining in-site traffic through tags & networking, on the whole hosting your blog on the same URL as our store is better for your business’ branding & SEO. But why?
1. SEO
All blogs are great for SEO, but self-hosted blogs allow you more control over SEO. Hosting your blog allows you to add SEO friendly plugins and other SEO features that make your blogging efforts much more effective. Hosting your blog on your domain also tells Google that your site offers fresh content ( which it loves) where as your blogging platform would reap all of your fresh content benefits if you hosted it with them.
2. Branding
.Hosting your blog on your domain reminds users that you are a business not just a blog, and helps build brand recognition. Being a content creator gives your store credibility & authority with customers, but that connection is not as easily made when your blog is hosted on a separate URL than your store.
3. Content Control
When you host your own blog, you have full control over the type of content you publish but if you use free blogging platforms, you are restricted by their guidelines. If you publish mostly promotional content or only write about your products, you could be flagged as low quality or spam. You could even get banned which would mean all of your hard content marketing work would go to waste.
4. Functionality Control
If you host your own blog, the only limits to functionality is your imagination. Key branding tools like social media widgets & buttons, newsletter sign-ups and coupon-codes are hard if not impossible to implement on free platforms.
5. Design Control
Design is a huge part of brand recognition, you want your readers recognize the look & feel of your blog from your store and vice versa. Free platforms do not offer the same customization options as self-hosting does.
25
Apr
Check out The New Rules Of SEO on Youtube!
If you missed yesterday’s awesome webinar The New Rules Of SEO, never fear Youtube is here!
23
Apr
Ask The SEO Experts: Photo-Sharing Links, Redesign Affect On SEO
3dcart’s CMO Joe Palko & SEO Manager Bryan Falla answer SEO, PPC, and conversion questions questions submitted by 3dcart merchants. To submit your questions fill out this form: http://blog.3dcart.com/get-your-seo-questions-answered-by-3dcarts-seo-experts/
Q. Which major photo-sharing sites (i.e. Flickr, photobucket, deviantart, imageshack) allow outgoing links?
A. In terms of dofollow links, most don’t. There are basically two reasons: They are protecting their own “link juice”, and also preventing people from wanting to use them only for the benefit of outbound links. The exception to that rule is Deviantart whose links are dofollow, however a landing page is put between deviantart and your target page which makes it not as valuable.
BUT that doesn’t mean there is not ways to use photo-sharing to build high-quality links: You can upload original images to Flickr’s creative commons and ask that if bloggers use your image or photo to place a one way back link to your blog or site. For example:
“Feel free to use this image for your website or blog as long as you include photo credit with a clickable (hyperlinked) and do-follow link to
blog.3dcart.com.”
It’s the same concept as the embed code used for “sharing” infographics, which pretty much tells people “fee free to share this graphic on your website with this code” and within the code there’s a do-follow backlink embedded.
So you can definitely build backlinks through these sites, but it’s important to understand that it’s more through networking than simply by posting. The backlinks won’t come from the sites themselves but from the people who use these sites.
Q. I’ve recently acquired a website that I feel is a bit too busy and might be confusing for some guests. I’m planning to do a redesign and streamline the site, making it more user-friendly. What are the risks in a redesign and what should I concentrate on when rebuilding with SEO in mind?
The only major risk is that the search engines won’t be able to find indexed content. Avoid this by
1. Try to keep the same URLs and site architecture
2. If that’s not possible, make sure all your indexed pages are redirected properly to their new URLs using 301 redirects
As long as the content is the same, you should be fine. On a side note, often times after redesigning a website, rankings will often increase, especially if the site is structured well, gets improved content, and is coded using best practices. I’ve found a nice list of best practices… http://terrymorris.net/bestpractices/
Make sure to register for 3dcart’s free webinar: The New Rules of SEO and check out 3dcart’s SEO services which can help you fast-track your optimization efforts.
3dcart’s CMO Joe Palko & SEO Manager Bryan Falla answer SEO, PPC, and conversion questions questions submitted by 3dcart merchants. To submit your questions fill out this form: http://blog.3dcart.com/get-your-seo-questions-answered-by-3dcarts-seo-experts/
20
Apr
How Does The Adwords Auction Work?
Depending on your vertical, ranking organically in Google’s first page can take years of optimizing your keywords & tags, building links and raising your site’s authority ( If you want to learn more, make sure to sign up for our SEO webinar). But showing up on first-page of results can make or break your business, so what can you TODAY to make sure your customers are seeing your business on the first page? Paid “Search Engine Marketing” can fast track your business to first-page glory.
PPC is big business. The king of search Google makes $32 billion in revenue from just their advertising platform adwords. And while Adwords pretty much unavoidable when running an ecommerce business, the process can be confusing and seem like a guessing-game if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The below inforgraphic from WordStream tries to explain the process simply but if you need help, let 3dcart PPC experts optimize and run your Adword campaigns for you.
![What is Google AdWords? [ infographic ]](http://www.wordstream.com/images/what-is-google-adwords.jpg)
© 2011 WordStream – a certified AdWords partner.
19
Apr
Join 3dcart’s SEO Experts For “The New Rules Of SEO” Webinar
Join 3dcart’s Search Engine Marketing experts on Tue, Apr 24, 2012 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST for “The New Rules Of SEO” Webinar.
Learn how to get your website to rank higher on Google, Yahoo! and Bing. 3dcart CMO Joe Palko & SEO manager Brian Falla will discuss how Relevance, Authority and Quality are all factors the affect their SEO rankings. This hour long informational webinar will also include a Question and Answer session along with appetizers and light refreshments (just kidding).
Register now to reserve your spot!
06
Apr
Get Your SEO Questions Answered By 3dcart’s SEO Experts
Online retail marketing takes a lot of work, know-how, time and money. That’s why this week 3dcart launched a new set of ecommerce marketing services to help drive more website traffic, higher brand awareness and more conversions to online stores & help ease the stress of marketing for online retailers.
3dcart’s new service packages are perfect for small and large retail businesses alike. 3dcart representatives work directly with customers to tailor each solution based on the retailer’s specific needs.
“Buying SEO services from a reputable firm may cost you $3,000 or more per month,” said 3dcart CMO Joe Palko. “In contrast, we’re offering the same services and more that build on years of ecommerce experience at a fraction of the cost because it is in our best interest to help small and medium sized businesses grow.”
And in an effort to offer 3dcart merchants even MORE help marketing their online store, 3dcart’s CMO Joe Palko & SEO Manager Bryan Falla will be answering your SEO, PPC, and conversion questions right here on the 3dcart blog. To submit your questions fill out the below form and keep reading the 3dcart blog!
05
Mar
Why Content For SEO?
Merchants sometimes are a little timid about content marketing – does all the effort you put into creating quality content REALLY affect your SEO?
YES! And the folks at Brafton make a strong case for using content marketing to boost your rank in search engines in their Why Content For SEO” infographic. Here’s some stats and information that you might find interesting:
- 52% of consumers say that blogs have influenced a purchase decision
- 61% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from an online merchant that offers custom content
- 92% of marketers say that content marketing is “very effective” or “somewhat effective” in SEO
10
Feb
SEO FAQ #Infographic
SEO is confusing. Mostly because it is ever-changing. Once you feel like you have a good grasp on link-building tactics, Google goes and changes your algorithm and all of your techniques no longer yield results! So when we saw this SEo FAQ, we knew we had to share.
We want to highlight out some important points:
1. Choosing Your Long Tail Keywords
Long Tail Keywords are noted in the first portion of the infographic as having lower competition and higher conversion rate than general one-word keywords. While that most definitely is true ( “shoes” will be more competitive and offer less conversions that “blue sparkly high heels”), the most important aspect to consider is WHICH long tail keywords to pursue. See our post “Choosing Buyer Keywords.”
2. Breadcrumbs are great for Google & users
Make sure that each category and product should have its own page and that you create a hierarchy using breadcrumb links. Like the Infograhic says, Google ranks pages and not websites. So by creating a separate page for all products and categories, you can target super specific high-converting keywords for each page. TIP: Showing users breadcrumbs makes the shopping experience much more user friendly. Here’s a great example:
