How To Speed Up Your eCommerce Website


We hear a lot of story about ecommerce website slow loading issue, which ultimately impact negatively. Before we learn How to Speed Up eCommerce Site, we might want to know, how a slow loading website negatively impact your business bottom line.

A website is said to have a high success when it load fast.

Page loading issue is obviously play a crucial part of any website’s User Experience (UX) & Search Engine Ranking. And many times we neglect this critical issue to serve better aesthetic design, a new nifty slider, add more images or unnecessary function to a site.

Imagine, You have great product showcase & content on your website, but if the site take longer than 10 seconds to load, most of your user might leave your website & all your efforts will be unseen by potentials buyers.

Design VS UX


Unfortunately, your website visitors don't pay much attention to all the bells and whistles you want to add to your websites, but they care about how fast your website load. And if your website doesn’t load quickly, you will lose potential visitors, conversions and off-course the purpose of the website “Revenue”.

Additional negative impact is website loading time is a high important factor when it comes to ranking especially Google search ranking & advertisement. Google publicly announced site speed is an important organic ranking factor among their other 200+ factors, in their Webmaster Central Blog at April 09, 2010.

Matthew "Matt" Cutts the former head of the web spam team at Google wrote a follow up article about website speed in his personal blog "speeding up your website is a great thing to do in general. Visitors to your site will be happier (and might convert more or use your site more), and a faster web will be better for all.

Statements made by other Googlers, John Mueller - Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google.

We do say we have a small factor in there for pages that are really slow to load where we take that into account.
We’re seeing an extremely high response-time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL). This has resulted in us severely limiting the number of URLs we’ll crawl from your site.

If you have a slow ecommerce website Google might crawl the site slower and that’s really bad – especially if you are adding new products, blog posts or making changes to your website.

I found similar statement on Bing Webmaster Guidelines, in their statement the call it "PAGE LOAD TIME (PLT)" & Bing direction about PageSpeed is "This element has a direct impact on the satisfaction a user has when they visit your website. Slow load times can lead to a visitor simply leaving your website, seeking their information elsewhere. If they came from our search results that may appear to us to be an unsatisfactory result that we showed. Faster is better, but take care to balance absolute page load speed with a positive, useful user experience."

A Very interesting recent (April 4, 2016) speed experiments ran at Forbes has concluded:

Over the testing period users read fewer articles each day whilst experiencing delays loading each web page.

In this article I’m going to dig some essential ecommerce Industry Stats regarding Webpage Speed. Because speedy sites do better than slower ones, we’ll talk about stats relevant to ecommerce website. Then, we’ll dive a little deeper and give you 11 Actionable Tips on How to Improve your eCommerce Website Load Times.

Research by Radware Ltd. suggests that slow load times are having an increased impact on e-commerce websites: assuming a conversion rate of 2% and an average spend of $115 per person, as the Centre for Retail Research  estimates, a site that gets 100,000 visitors a day would lose over $130,000 a day if 57% of its visitors bounced from frustration over slow loading.


Page Speed Affects eCommerce Website Conversion Rates



According to  Radware, a one second delay in page time equals a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

Webperformance Today  found that for every one second of improvement, Walmart.com experienced a 2% jump in conversions.

  • The median top 100 ecommerce home page takes 5.5 seconds to render feature content.
  • The median page has increased in size by 13.59% in one year.
  • Forty-eight percent of the top 100 retail sites fail to compress images.


Today, a fast-loading website is a necessity; isn't a luxury. A website load fast should improve your visitor satisfaction levels and the number of conversions, for instance. 50% of Customers expect a site to load in less than 2 seconds, even majority of them tend to close a website that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. Almost 75% of online shoppers who’ve trouble with websites speed performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again. And obviously they would also recommend their friends not to buy or go through those websites.

John: Joe, Where you get the awesome shoe?

Joe: I first tried to buy it from abcdeal, but the site load too slow; so I bought it from xyzdeal.

OK, what does it mean? It means, abcdeal had a potential customer joe (may be joe will never come back to that website), but lost as it’s site load slowly & the site lost Joe’s friend’s too.

So, how can i improve my eCommerce site speed?

In this article, I will explain you step by step guide to increase the speed of your eCommerce website.

Step 1: Test Your eCommerce Website Loading Speed


To improve your website speed, you first have to determine why it is slow. In order to understand that, run your website though a speed test. It’ll help you discover the areas you need to improve & current state of your website speed & performance.

There are quite a few decent (and free) site speed checkers available online. I like  Google PageSpeed Insights Most. With this free Google Tools, you can test your website's mobile & desktop devices load time of individual pages. The tools also analyze website performance & give you actionable suggestions to make your website faster.

Google PageSpeed Insights Tools

Visit the site, enter your site URL and run the test. It’ll grade your website 0-100 for mobile & desktop user performance & experience.

Another great tool I would like to introduce you is  Pingdom, Try their  Pingdom Website Speed Test, This tool measures the performance of your website by Load time, Page size, & number of HTTP requests. Pingdom shows you how long it takes to load your site on the first visit (how long it would load for someone who never visited your site before) and for the second visit (how long it would load if someone visited your site before and has assets cached in their browser). It also shows you how many http requests it needs to load your page.

In short, it is an easy-to-use tool to help webmasters, site owners and web developers everywhere optimize the performance of their websites.

Speed Test & Accessibility Tools I Recommend

PageSpeed Insights by Google -  https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Pingdom -  http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Website Report by University of Illinois -  http://fae.cita.uiuc.edu/

WebPagetesthttps://www.webpagetest.org/

Step 2: Reduce HTTP Requests

A Website, essentially, is a collection of data files. Now, imagine that a separate HTTP request is required each time the browser needs to fetch a file from your server. If the browser continues to get your site’s files in this manner, the site will take a long time to load.

So, How to reduce the number of HTTP requests?

Use CSS Sprites: Despite the scary name, a CSS Sprite is just a group of images combined into one. For Example, if you need to load 2 versions of the same button (active and inactive), you can bundle them together. This way, it’ll take just one HTTP request to acquire the entire CSS sprite (image bundle), and then you can display the appropriate image depending on the situation.

Enable KeepAlive Connections On Your Server: Usually, browsers can make one HTTP request per one HTTP connection. However, if you have KeepAlive connections enabled, the browser will be capable of sending multiple HTTP requests (data requests) over the same TCP connection.

Step 3: Optimize Images

In almost 87% of my personal project, I found images are the culprit for website slow loading issue. Don’t be careless with your images; think about how you can optimize them. It’s ok if you want to showcase your products by high resolution images, but try to optimize/resize them as much as possible.

According to Radware, roughly 45% of top 100 e-commerce sites on the web don’t bother to compress their images.

You can use free tools like tinypng.com or tinyjpg.com to dramatically reduce the size of your images, while the image quality defer silently.

Step 4: Reduce the Number of Plugins Installed

You know, plugins add extra functionality to your web store’s pages, by including one or more CSS & JavaScript files (Think about Review Widget, Social Media Sharing Plugin, Pop Ups, and Newsletter Signups, etc…) integrated with your website template.

As long as the plugins installed & stay on active mode (doesn’t mean you really use it), your web store CMS loads those plugins CSS & JavaScript files in non-render-blocking way. Meaning, the browser loads them via HTTP  request & spends some time to loading those unnecessary files.

What is a problem though: Browser loads those files even if you don’t use the plugin. As long as it is installed, it will continue to load the files.

So, I really recommending you uninstalling unnecessary plugins for improving your web store’s performance. Not the ones you are using of course. But absolutely, please do remove the ones you are currently not using.

Step 5: Choose a Optimized Template

Unfortunately, your online store’s performance is somewhat dependent on which template you have installed. A template that is optimized for performance includes all styles in one CSS file, and includes all necessary JavaScript in one JavaScript file, loaded in a non-blocking way (or at least keep it minimal). A template that is not optimized for performance has multiple CSS and JavaScript files, and loads them in a render-blocking way.

So before you buy a template, I recommend you to test the template with Google Pagespeed Tools and see the performance score.

Step 6: Optimize the JavaScript and CSS files

OK. Now comes the tricky part. If you already have a template installed on your website, and you don’t want to buy & install another template, but still want to improve your site’s speed & performance, you have to manually optimize your files.

Here is How To:

You can make your files smaller by Minifying JavaScript & CSS files with any of the available third-party tools:



Step 7: Use a Fast and Reliable Hosting Servers


Your hosting company and package have a huge impact on the speed of your eCommerce site. Make sure your web host’s servers run well and can handle your busiest times. For example, you’re running a flash sale. Can your host handle the added traffic quickly and efficiently? If not, find another web host.

One more thing to consider is that it’s best to get a Dedicated IP Address for your account. As per GoDaddy, a dedicated IP could “ensure faster response during periods of high traffic load.” (If your site uses an SSL certificate, this means there already is a dedicated IP allocated for you, since it’s required to establish an SSL connection.)

8. Use a PHP Accelerator


What PHP Accelerators do is increase the speed of PHP Application, which leads to “improvements of web page generation throughput by factors of 2 to 7.”

Although it’s hard to imagine that no such accelerator is installed on your server yet, check with your webmaster/web host to make sure there is one. Some widely-used PHP accelerators include:

If you have a site written in a programming language other than PHP, most likely you won’t need an accelerator for it. (For instance, no corresponding tool is required for a Java  Based Website.)

Step 9: Use GZIP Compression

Gzip Compression allows the server to compress site files when returning them to the browser, which reduces the size of files exchanged and, of course, shortens the time it takes to load a page. According to Google, this feature can reduce the file size of one’s pages and stylesheets up to 70-90%.

GZIP Facts:
  • GZIP performs best on text-based assets: CSS, JavaScript, HTML.
  • All modern browsers support GZIP compression and will automatically request it.
  • Your server must be configured to enable GZIP compression.
  • Some CDNs require special care to ensure that GZIP is enabled.

Ask your web host if their server support GZIP Compression. It can greatly speed up your eCommerce site by reducing files size without ruining image quality or the site itself.

Step 10: Include Breakpoints for Mobile

A breakpoint is the point at which your webpage will resize or respond to suit the best browsing configuration for the screen that your customer is viewing.

If a webpage doesn’t offer multiple breakpoints for different screen resolutions, the viewing quality of the site will be negatively impacted.

11. Use a Content Delivery Network

A content deliverynetwork (CDN), essentially, is a network of additional servers used to deliver site content to the user. The beauty of using a CDN is that such content as your videos, images, CSS files, or JavaScript can be gathered from multiple servers at one (even a closer one to your user!), which spurs their delivery.

You see, a browser can establish only a limited number of simultaneous connections to one domain. But this limitation is lifted if you use a CDN. Popular content delivery networks include:
It should be mentioned, however, that content delivery networks don’t come cheap, and you may choose to exhaust other means of accelerating your site before you turn to a CDN provider.

Be sure to consult a Professional SEO Consultant on how a CDN may affect your traffic from image search first.

As we have seen, website load speed directly correlate to user experience & search engine ranking. If you care about your search engine rankings, and the experience of your users, you should be improving performance of your website.

If you think that your website still too slow, let me know; I'll inspect your website & help you speed up.

How To Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets



There are numerous reasons you might want to find out how much traffic a website gets. Perhaps you are interested in researching websites that compete in the same niche as a website you own. Maybe you are considering starting a new website, and you want to research the niche to see if there is enough interest in the topic for your new website to be viable. Perhaps you want to grow the traffic to a website that you own. Maybe you’re curious about how much traffic some of the big media publishers’ websites get.

When I visit a website for the first time, I don't look the design; look at something else. In less than few seconds, I get a estimate of how much traffic that website gets which helps me decide whether or not to stay.

Knowing how much traffic a website gets help me validate the website’s content and let me know how much traffic I need to get to see similar results.

Here are My 7 favorite techniques for figuring out how much traffic a particular website gets.

1. Alexa
The Alexa Ranking isn’t exactly “little-known,” but it is the best-known metric for ranking websites. Alexa tracks stats for everyone who has the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser, which accounts for less than 1% of internet users. So it’s not very accurate, but it’ll give you a rough idea of the website’s popularity.




Alexa data is not completely accurate, because it involves flawed methodology. Alexa ranks websites based on how much traffic they get from users who have chosen to install the Alexa toolbar. Alexa toolbar users are a small minority of website users, which makes the data somewhat skewed. However, basic Alexa data is free to the public and easy to obtain, and it does give you insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

2. Compete.com
Compete.com is a web traffic analysis service of Compete, Inc. which operates in the United States and publishes the approximate number of U.S. visitors to the top 1,000,000 web sites.

Based on checking my sites and Income Diary, the “Unique Visitors” stat that it generates is much lower than the actual traffic.

3. SimilarWeb.com
SimilarWeb is another website traffic checker that’s similar to Alexa and Compete, except, it’s got a lot more detail put into it, so it’s more accurate!

The main takeaway is that it gives you a line graph with values for the number of daily unique visitors and the sources. You can see the countries that your traffic comes from, top referring sites, the top destination sites (sites people visit after yours), display ads, audience interests, and up to 10 organic keywords with the free version.

4. comScore.com Reports
comScore is an American global media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to many of the world's largest enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers.

Comscore publishes a number of different traffic reports. Their reports tend to cover only the largest publishers, and they include metrics by country for websites with the highest traffic numbers. This can be useful if you are interested in learning about how much traffic the most prominent websites on the Internet are generating.

5. Traffic Estimates by TrafficEstimate.com
This free resource gives you a bunch of data in one place, although some of it is inaccurate. You’ll be able to find out some basic Alexa rankings, keyword phrases the website is targeting, other websites targeting similar keyword phrases and websites with close relationships.

If you’re researching smaller or newer websites, you might not get any results from this tool. The closely related websites report is flawed; in some cases it does find closely related sites, but in other cases the sites it shows are all unrelated.

6. quantcast.com
Quantcast is an American technology company, founded in 2006, that specializes in audience measurement and real-time advertising.

Quantcast offers you a multiple opportunities to discover a website’s traffic measures. If you are interested in finding out metrics for your own website, you can subscribe to their services to receive detailed insights.

Quantcast also offers website owners the choice to make selected analytics data publicly available. Many website owners take advantage of this because they think it benefits them to show potential advertisers their site’s metrics as verified by an unbiased, trusted third-party source. So you can check to see if the website you are interested in researching has a public Quantcast profile available.

7. searchmetrics.com
The Searchmetrics Suite for enterprise companies is the global leader in SEO marketing and analytics, SEO optimization, social and content marketing.

Similar to SEMRush, Searchmetrics will show you the organic search visibility for a website and also some of their top keyword terms.

Unless the owner of the website reveals exactly how much traffic they’re getting, every other figure is a best guess. Most tools are surprisingly inaccurate when it comes to generating stats. They are good, however, for comparing yourself against others.

Do you know of any other ways to figure out how much traffic a website gets?

Google Drops Their Feature Phone Crawler & Error Report in Search Console

No Feature Phone Crawler & Error Report Available in Google Search Console
November 29, 2016 Google Announced Goodbye to Content Keywords, Wednesday, November 30, 2016 Wrote on Webmaster Central Blog that they're doping Google's feature-phone crawling & indexing in Search Console. Although there are probably a lot of feature phones around, I wonder how many people actually use search with a feature-phone.

No surprise there, This does not impact how Google crawls or indexes smartphone content, just feature phones. Feature phones are those old Nokia phones that let you access websites in a text-based interface.

Google said that “Limited mobile devices, "feature-phones", require a special form of markup or a transcoder for web content. Most websites don't provide feature-phone-compatible content in WAP/WML any more".
"We won't be using the feature-phone user-agents for crawling for search going forward."
It Means, Google Bot won’t be using the feature-phone user-agents for crawling for search going forward. So you will no longer see those in Search Console logs.
Use "handheld" link annotations for dynamic serving of feature-phone content.
Some sites provide content for feature-phones through dynamic serving, based on the user's user-agent. To understand this configuration, make sure your desktop and smartphone pages have a self-referential alternate URL link for handheld (feature-phone) devices:  
<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="[current page URL]" /> 
 This is a change from our previous guidance of only using the "vary: user-agent" HTTP header. We've updated our documentation on making feature-phone pages accordingly. We hope adding this link element is possible on your side, and thank you for your help in this regard. We'll continue to show feature-phone URLs in search when we can recognize them, and when they're appropriate for users.
It means, that if you do have a feature phone support on your website, you need to use “handheld” link annotations for dynamic serving of feature-phone content.
We're retiring feature-phone tools in Search Console:
Without the feature-phone Googlebot, special sitemaps extensions for feature-phone, the Fetch as Google feature-phone options, and feature-phone crawl errors are no longer needed. We continue to support sitemaps and other sitemaps extensions (such as for videos or Google News), as well as the other Fetch as Google options in Search Console.
"We've worked to make these changes as minimal as possible. Most websites don't serve feature-phone content, and wouldn't be affected. If your site has been providing feature-phone content, we thank you for your help in bringing the Internet to feature-phone users worldwide!" Posted by John Mueller, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst.
This is a change from previous documentation for feature-phones of only using the "vary: user-agent" HTTP header. Feature-phone tools are going to disappear from the search console.

Google Has Just Removed “Content Keywords” From ‎Webmaster Search Console

Google Has Just Removed Content Keywords Feature from the Google Search Console: one of the earliest features found in the Google Search Console when it was first built.
Search Console Content Keywords Screenshtto
Content Keywords in Google Search Console Tool

In the early days - when Google Search Console was called Webmaster Tools, the content keywords feature was the only way to see what keywords Google Search Bot found when it crawled a particular website. It was very useful to webmaster & site owner to see a combined keywords lists of the most frequent keywords within a site that Google discovered. It was also pretty helpful to check Content Keywords section, if your site was hacked.

Content Keywords tool allows you to determine, What keywords Google Crawler seeing in your website. It shows the keywords that are repeatedly used on your website, along with keyword variations and significance. These data help you quickly intuit if you need more content created around certain keywords, themes and topics. It also shows you which pages the keywords appear on your website.

At November 29, 2016 John Mueller, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Announced at Webmaster Central Blog that Google will be removing the “Content Keywords” section from Google Search Console. Here's the Mueller's Entire Post:
In the early days - back when Search Console was still called Webmaster Tools - the content keywords feature was the only way to see what Googlebot found when it crawled a website. It was useful to see that Google was able to crawl your pages at all, or if your site was hacked.
In the meantime, you can easily check any page on your website and see how Googlebot fetches it immediately, Search Analytics shows you which keywords we've shown your site in search for, and Google informs you of many kinds of hacks automatically. 
Additionally, users were often confused about the keywords listed in content keywords. And so, the time has come to retire the Content Keywords feature in Search Console.
The words on your pages, the keywords if you will, are still important for Google's (and your users') understanding of your pages. While our systems have gotten better, they can't read your mind: be clear about what your site is about, and what you'd like to be found for. Tell visitors what makes your site, your products and services, special! 
What was your most surprising, or favorite, keyword shown? Let us know in the comments!
Also Tweeted on @googlewmc

How Does Google Search Consoles Come Up with Content Keywords?

The Content Keywords lists represent the keywords and their variants Google found when crawling your website. When reviewed along with the Search Queries report and your site's listing in actual search results for your targeted keywords, it provides insight into how Google is retrieving the content of your website.

The significance of each keyword reflects how often it's found on your site's pages. Click each keyword to see a sampling of pages on which it appears. Both keywords and their variants are listed in order of frequency of appearance.

This does not mean you’re ranking for these keywords or these keywords has any impact on your website ranking, it just means they’re the most relevant keywords for your site according to Google Bot.

If any unexpected keywords, such as “payday loan” or “Viagra”, appear on this page, this could be a sign that your site has been hacked.


Do Content Keywords in Search Console Tools Affect Search Rankings?

You you'll find thousand of article telling you that this section give us Opportunity To Discover New Keywords. Some SEO “Experts” continue to hype that, what we sees in the Content Keywords Section is the Most Important Keywords for your website & Google Give Priority To Those Keywords.

Simply, These Are All Lies Fake Gurus Love to Tell. Here's John Mueller Response:

At Oct 23, 2012 John Mueller Answered The Question on Google Product Forums"the keywords data shown in that Webmaster Tools feature is only based on the crawled content, not based on the relevance for indexing. For example, if you have a calendar on your pages, we might pick up the weekdays & month names very frequently, but that would not mean that the site is in any "penalized" because of that. Our algorithms are pretty good at picking up issues like that. 
On the other hand, if you see words there that are totally outside of your normal content (eg pharmaceutical product names, if your website isn't about that), then that would be a sign that something's not quite right."

I also told many times that, Content Keywords means that what your website is all about. What keywords YOU use in your site, their variants and occurrences in your website content, all are crawled by Google Crawler. For example, if SEO Expert has many occurrence and top on the Content Keywords list, then Google sees that your website is about SEO.


John Mueller also suggests that site owners should use the Fetch as Googlebot to verify keywords on a page or to use Search Analytics to check for keywords that are bringing searchers to the website.
Fetch as Googlebot
Search Console Fetch as Googlebot

Need The Best Keyword Research Service OR Local SEO Services? Contact Us Now!

How To Improve your Online Retail Store’s Search Engine Optimization

e-Commerce Website SEO Tips
Improve your e-Commerce Website Search Engine Optimization
You know the math right, According to the National Retail Federation’s annual consumer spending survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, consumers plan to spend an average of $935.58 during the holiday shopping season. Total spending includes gifts for others, self-spending, food, flowers, decorations and greeting cards for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. Total planned spending this year is second only to the record total spending in 2015, at $952.58.

NRF Expects online retail sales in November and December (excluding autos, gas and restaurants) to increase a solid 3.6 percent to $655.8 billion. Online sales are forecast to increase between 7 and 10 percent over last year to as much as $117 billion. Retailers are expected to hire between 640,000 and 690,000 seasonal workers this holiday season, in line with last year’s 675,300 holiday positions.

In our last article I talked about how November Replacing Black Friday & Cyber Monday for USA, UK & Canadian Shoppers. So, now you know the Online Retail Trends & want to be top of search engine organic result. In This article, I'll focus on how to optimize your online shop or website for higher search engine organic ranking.

Have an e-Commerce Website? Every bit of your e-Commerce website markup, titles, description text, links and images that can be read by a search engine crawler and indexed in a search engine database needs to be optimized; and by optimizing, you have to make it easier and faster for a search engine to find your website content.

Your competitors are already exploring this option, why not you? If you are not utilizing this, you will find yourselves drowning in new organic visitors.

While the principle is relatively simple to understand, the ‘how’ and ‘where’ to start can get progressively intricate but before that happens, here are two axis (On-Page & Off-Page SEO) of Search Engine Optimization to work your online shop.

On-Page SEO Factors: The first place to start with SEO is on your e-commerce Retail Store’s website itself. Search engine algorithms look for several factors when they crawl through each page of your site. The most important ones are:


  • Website Structure
  • Website Speed
  • Keywords
  • Product Page URL
  • Title Tag & Meta Descriptions
  • Content Optimization
  • Images Optimization
  • Internal Links & Anchors


Website Structure

Structural elements of your online site and the way pages & products link to each other also affect ranking. Search engines go through a link structure to find and index pages. If your site is structured well, all pages and product pages will be easily found by search engine crawlers & can achieve higher organic ranking.

A clear site structure is important not only regarding ranking but most of all regarding good user experience. The aim is to build an eCommerce Site where shoppers can easily find products and information they came for.

Website Speed

contact for loading issues
If you want to load your website faster, or have website loading issues. CONTACT US

Having the best site structure will not mean anything to search engine, if your website or shop don't load fast enough (ideal is below 3 second). An statistics found that 69% of consumers leave slow loading websites. While, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less & 40% abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load.



Modern ranking algorithms take the loading speed of a website very seriously, simply because good search engines don’t like recommending slow pages as this would be bad for user experience. Also, as search engines are in the business of bringing their user the best results, doing otherwise would reflect badly on them.

Free Tools to Measure Your Website Speed:


April 09, 2010, Google Official Webmaster Central Blog Statement is "Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."


Keywords

There are different types of keywords, as well as different types of search queries that people use to find products they are looking for. Search Engine Optimization is pretty much based on keywords. Finding out what words searchers use to find online stores similar to yours is the key to your online business success.


After doing deep research, you’ll have a list of relevant keywords in your bucket. You can then start the optimization process which means placing keywords throughout the whole website. The main keywords should be used in titles, URLs, headlines and repeated naturally in the content; others should be located in image tags and meta descriptions.

Free Tools to Start Keywords Research:


Product Page URL

One easy way to improve organic ranking on your e-commerce site is to ensure that each of your product URL is SEO-friendly, which means that it should include the main keyword that the page is targeting.

URL stands for uniform resource locator; it is a web address of a single web page. URLs are displayed in a web browser and on SERPs. There are two types of web addresses: static and dynamic.

A Static URL Looks Like:

myonlineshop.com/category/pet-care

A Dynamic URL Looks Like:

myonlineshop.com/category/?p=0254007

I recommend you to use static URLs whenever possible, because static one make sense & easy to remember.

Title Tag & Meta Descriptions

The Title Tag should define a site’s content in a concise and clear manner. You should keep it short & simple, I suggest that, keep it under max 60 characters. Be sure to include at least two of your most important keywords along with your brand’s name.

A title tag plays a significant part in search engine organic ranking as well as increase CTR, as it appears in the search engine result pages (SERPs), on external websites and directly in browsers.

Google Meta Tag Example
Google Title Tag & Meta Descriptions In Action.

As you can see above frog this screenshot, a meta-description is a short paragraph which is displayed right under a title tag  & URL on SERPs.

Sometimes a short title is not enough to adequately communicate what your e-commerce website potential visitor. Meta Description gives you the opportunity to introduce your brand before a searcher pays you a visit and see the products you offer.

The optimal length of a Meta Description should be max 160 characters. While creating a copy is good to be as much creative as you can. A boring description can decrease CTR and bring you fewer organic visitors. Unlike Title Tag, Meta Description is not visible directly in browsers.

Content Optimization

Although content don't play much when it's comes to online shopping site, but website content still has its technical importance for search engine ranking. A eCommerce Website with a blog and continuously new content posting using keywords related to its products is likely to get a high place on search engines if, of course, the content is of related to the user interest.

    Unique Product Descriptions: The Unique Product Description are extremely important factors in top organic ranking. The better the information is, the better the information will be (description, faq, images, etc.) and rich media (photos from all angles, videos, products in context, etc.). In addition, the more complete the product descriptions (description, faq, images, video, etc.), the better your site will be indexed on the search engines.

Tip: 81% of consumers search and shop online before buying a product, either online or in-store. However, a retailer or distributor who does not present all of their online products will lose sales.


Images Optimization

Take the time to name your product images correctly before you upload them. Not XYZ64564 but “winter-baby-boot-0325”, and also add an Image ALT tag “Winter Baby Boots”, Also if there's any folder or directory where your upload images, use the same thought.

Internal Links & Anchors

Links that point to other pages of your site called Internal Links – are an important part of on-page SEO aspect. Internal Links help search engine to crawl through your site, indexing each page as they go. Links can be text, images or representations of buttons you can click on to ‘navigate’ or jump to other pages or files. In this case you will focus on text links, which can make a world of difference to your website internal linking structure.

SEO Internal Links Best Practices

Anchor or Keyword in Links - This is the word or phrase that ‘names’ the link. Search engines like Google take into account the Anchor or Keyword Text in Links. Let’s say that these links are placed at the home page of your eCommerce Site, they would look a bit like this:

  • Women's Watches
  • Men's Watches
  • Shoes for Men

You are telling users and search engine crawlers that behind those links and according to their anchor text phrasing, that they will find either Watches for women, Watches for men and Watches for men.

It all seems pretty obvious when done right, but let’s see what over-optimized links would look like. If we take the same phrases but apply the anchors the wrong way:

  • Women's Watches
  • Men's Watches
  • Shoes for Men's
With these over-optimized anchors text, you are telling the web crawler to only take into account the following words:
  • Women's
  • Men's
  • Men's
My Opinion is, anchors text should be human-understandable as well as to search crawler.

Off-Page SEO Factors: Off-Page SEO techniques involve building links from other parts of the web to your site. In the past, e-Commerce site managers would scatter links to their site all over forums, directories, and comments sections, as well as buy links on other sites. These kinds of link building techniques are penalized by search engines these days, which means that you need to take a different approach.


Focus on building relationships & link earning, not link building. Note it, Not all the links hold the same weight, it means that you make sure that the links you build are natural & authentic. Read More about, Google's Link Schemes Here.

Although proper link building is not an easy thing to do, there are still many white hat SEO techniques you can start with even today, without considerable efforts or expenses. Check out following link building methods.

  • Ask for Backlinks.
  • Build Relationships.
  • Give a Testimonial.
  • Start a Blog.
  • List your Site in Trustworthy Directories.
  • Design & Share Infographic.
  • Write a Great Guest Post.
  • Discover competitors' Backlinks.
  • Recover your Broken Backlinks.
  • Launch a contest or a giveaway campaign.

Need Legitimate Backlinks? Contact ME Now!

So, keep your link building plan until you achieve the #1 on Google also make sure to share your thought in the comment field. Use these simple tips to help you get started with your eCommerce website Search Engine Optimization Campaign and keep an eye out for my next article, where I'll explain How Your Competitors Dominating Over Your Business.


How to Use Reddit to Drive Huge Traffic to Your Website

Reddit to Drive Traffic to Website
Reddit to Drive Traffic to Your Website

We already no that, Reddit is one of the best & popular social bookmarking site. By using it effectively you can  Drive Huge Traffic to Your Website too.


In order to be successfully drive traffic to your website with Reddit, you can’t be a Reddit marketer. You have to be a Redditor & have to share their passions too, yes i MEAN it. But more importantly, you have to share their hatred for self-promotion. Only share something with the community if you think it’s worthy & awesome; someone might be interest to the topic.

There are few steps you need to follow to be successfully drive traffic to your website via Reddit & Reddit Reputation. Skipping even one of them can ruin your reputation on Reddit, or risk get you banned.
It is easy to get banned from Reddit. Posting too many links or breaking the rules in a subreddit will almost guarantee you get banned from that subreddit or from the site entirely. This is how Reddit fights the constant onslaught of spammers and over-zealous marketers.

Read the rules of sub-reddits and avoid spamming

Many users submit their links without knowing about the rules of sub-reddit. Reddit is highly concern about spamming. It has a spam filter which automatically filters out spam. But, don’t worry. You can prevent it. Before submitting, read the rules of sub-reddits where you want to submit your link because different sub-reddits have different rules.

Also be sure that your link was submitted before by you or someone else or not. After submitting, to check whether your link is alive or not, click the “New” tab of that sub-reddit where you have submitted your link. If it is not there, it means, your link is caught by spam filters.

Keep It Relevant

If you want to get large amounts of traffic from Reddit, you have to keep your posts highly relevant to the users. This means that the more that you can tailor your posts to the subreddit that you’re posting in, the better. Avoid posting content that addresses too broad of an audience.

This requires you to do a little bit of research into your subreddit and see what kinds of posts are already popular. Get a feel for your audience there. Then you will be more equipped to create a popular post of your own. If the end goal of your site is to sell a product or get subscribers, you will need to do some customer development first.

This will ensure that you’re in touch with what your audience wants, while saving you a ton of time in the long run.

Only Post Great Content

Only post your best content on Reddit! Short and generic content will not perform well. It will also get down-voted and you’ll lose any valuable reputation points (karma) that you have.

Only post content that is in-depth, unique, well-written, helpful and actionable. Wherever you post your article, Reddit users are going to click on it to check it out. What they think of it (either upvote or down vote) will dictate your results.

Follow other Reddit users

It won’t give you up-votes or traffic, but it is very helpful. What you have to do is watch what other users are doing. Specially follow users whose links are on front page. Try to understand why they have got so many up-votes or what types of posts get more up-votes.

Find out what’s the difference between your title and their titles. See how they comments on a post. This will give you more knowledge and you can understand what to do next.

No Double Dipping

Don’t start getting greedy on me now! When you log in to your analytics account and see that spike in traffic and realize: “Oh yeah, I posted on Reddit – and it only took me 5 seconds!”

Making a link submission as your first action as a redditor is a huge red flag. Even if you are posting a genuine, relative link, it still looks suspicious to moderators and Reddit’s source code. If this link gets remove or marked as spam, your account might be done for. We recommend always posting comments and voting on other submissions before you start posting links.

Usually the next natural thought is “I should be doing this all the time!” But that’s where you can get yourself in trouble. Stay out of “hot” areas. This means that if you just posted a link in a subreddit, let it rest for a while! I usually wait 2 weeks to a month before I post another link of my own in the same subreddit.

Have fun

This is possibly the most important point on the list that impatient marketers overlook. This is why ‘the other guys’ are terrible at getting traffic from Reddit. You need to be a normal Reddit user. Remember, you can’t be a marketer, you have to be a redditor.
Reddit does not tolerate users that upvote their own posts. This is because spammers are constantly trying to implement upvote schemes that get their content to the top of a big subreddit.
Interact with the rest of the site. Build up a post history that shows that you’re a normal user. Build up your karma points by posting helpful or funny comments on other posts.

Address the Concerns of the Community Before They Have Them

If you post links to your site on Reddit, there will be a lot of users that will to try to find an excuse to down vote your posts, report you to moderators, bad mouth you etc.

What you have to do is beat them to the punch and address all of their concerns before they can get a word in.
Reddit has take a strong anti-harassment stance this past year (2015). If you are harassing a user or someone harassing you, you will likely be reported to the admins and they will take action.

Don’t Ever Let Your First or Second post be a promotion

This should go without saying, but if you’re new to a subreddit, be sure to post a few other things in that there first before you decide to promote anything of your own. I made this point short, since the last one was so long.
You can be banned from any subreddit by a moderator of that subreddit. A subreddit ban can be time-limited or indefinite. When you are banned from a subreddit, you will receive a private message that says how long the ban will be in effect and optionally the reason you were banned. After you are banned from a subreddit, you will not be able to submit any posts or comments to that subreddit.

Don’t Over-Promote Your Post or Website

You may think that if you don’t promote your website repeatedly in the same Subreddit that you’ll be fine. But this is yet another big Reddit no-no. Reddit moderators and users can see your site-wide activity. Not to mention that they have automatic spam filters. Don’t abuse the system, and you’ll be safe.
You can also be banned from submitting posts or comments to a subreddit by the “AutoModerator” bot. AutoModerator is a Reddit bot that moderators use to perform tasks on their behalf. One ability that AutoModerator has is to remove any posts or comments from a specific user. So if you have been banned by AutoModerator, you will still be able to submit posts and comments, but they will instantly be removed from the subreddit.
If you post links to the same domain name too often you run a huge risk. Reddit's automatic spam filters will blacklist your domain, so that if anyone posts it, it won’t show up. They can also “ghost” your account which is a special kind of punishment for spammers. Getting ghosted means that none of your posts ever show up to anyone but you. So you can post as much as you want, but they will never show up to anyone else.

Share Your New Posts With Your Friends

Even if you do not belong to a Reddit team, you should still have a group of people or a network that you can share your content with. This step entails you sending your new Reddit posts to your friends or Twitter followers that are also Reddit users. If they like what you posted, they’ll give you an up-vote, which will attract other Reddit users, and get the ball rolling for your post to get it popular.

Comment and Reply to Everyone

Activity on your Reddit post breeds more activity. This means that when someone comments on your post, reply to their comment to double the comment count. When posts have lots of comments, it gets more redditors to click on your post, and join the conversation. You can even be the first one to comment on a link that you post.

Be Humble

Most people take criticism on their post as a bad thing. But you can use it as one of your biggest advantages.

Not only will this help you with "Address the Concerns of the Community Before They Have Them", it will also help you to get better at using Reddit to drive traffic and customers to your website. When you reply to comments, be sure to learn as much from your commentators as you can.

Personal Thought: Spend At least 10 minutes a week, and get a feel for the community.