One of the reasons I like ecommerce SEO is that there is a tremendous amount of opportunities to increase the optimization quality of an online store. Unlike service businesses or online brochure websites which typically only have a few pages, a catalog of products creates a great opportunity to increase the amount of content and provide relevance for the search engines.

Here at Best Rank, we spend a lot of time educating clients about optimization and how they can use it to gain a competitive advantage in their marketplace.  Having a specialty in ecommerce, my conversations are often about tips and advice on what online store owners can do to improve their rankings and increase traffic. There are plenty of resources for learning SEO online, but not a lot specific to ecommerce.

For those interested in getting their hands dirty, I have created a list of 62 Ecommerce Search Engine Optimization Tips & Ideas. Of course there are tips here that apply to non-ecommerce sites as well, but ecommerce SEO does deserve its own list.

The list is in no particular order. If you have some tips or feedback you want to add, please feel free to comment .

1. Do a search in Google using site:www.yourdomain.com. This allows you to see what pages of your website are being indexed and how they look. The results should be keyword rich and have call to action for users to click.

2. Do a site: search in Google for your competitors. While you are looking at your own indexing, look at your competition. Are their search engine results better optimized or better written? Don’t let them win.

3. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to find keywords. If you have an Adwords account you are probably familiar with Google’s Keyword Tool. If not, you can use Google’s External Keyword Tool Be sure set the match type on [exact] so you are looking at the number of searches for that specific keyword.

4. Don’t forget text on your homepage. Graphics are attractive and are great for users. Be sure that there is some html text on the homepage as well. If you have to put it near the footer, fine. Just make sure it is somewhere.

5. Be sure your homepage title uses your 3 most important keywords. I prefer to limit any given page to focus on 3 keywords. Some people like 4 and some people 2. Your homepage optimization is really important to tell the engines what your site is going to focus on.

6. Choose 3 keyword phrases to focus on per category page. I use the similar 3 keyword rule for category pages as well.  I will sometimes use only 2 if it is focused. Of course you are then going to make sure these keywords are used in the title, content, etc. but we will get to that later.

7. Be sure the top keyword for the page is first in your Title tag for all category pages. The first word in your title tag is the most important.

8. Be sure to customize the product pages Title.
If your ecommerce software allows dynamic insertion, use it. For example, if you can tell the system to use specific elements of the product in the title, use it. You can use product names, manufacturer, and SKU. They are all valuable.  If you don’t have a lot of products and your software allows for custom title writing, be sure to write custom titles.

9. Format the Title For Relevance & Clicks.
This can apply to categories and products. The formatting of a Title I like to use is “Keyword Phrase 1 | Call To Action or Benefit Using Keyword Phrase 2 and 3 if possible”. For example: “Hospital Towels | Wholesale Medical Towels On Sale”

10. Use .html or .htm for page naming. If you are using a CMS system and prefer no extensions such as /keyword/ that is fine too. While using .html may be considered old school, it still works. We all know that everyone claims that search engines treat most pages extensions equally, but my experience has seen differently. It’s still a good practice.

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Guest Author: Jason Kreidman is the Vice President of Business Development for Best Rank, Inc.  Jason has been building, managing, and marketing ecommerce businesses for over 14 years and now assists other merchants in getting results online.

When link building, many SEO practitioners face the question: Should I focus on getting thousands of backlinks, or a few quality backlinks? The answer is you want to get as many quality backlinks as you can. Building tons of links might sound like the most effective means of improving your visibility in the search engines, but quality is and always has been more important.

Think about it like this:

Backlinks are like human citation on the web. The way we link out to sites expresses how we feel about them: better sites get more links from more authoritative sites. Just as an expert’s opinion on the news is held in higher regards than your average Joe, a link from an expert site is respected the same way. If you were looking to lose weight, whom would you trust more: an experienced dietician or some random guy you met at the supermarket? Just like we trust those with more credibility and experience in our day-to-day lives, Google trusts sites that display experience and authority more as well. This principle applies directly to link building and how we practice it.

Let’s say you’re the guy from the supermarket earlier, and oddly enough, you actually know your stuff. No one is going to necessarily believe what you have to say without further proof or evidence. But what if there was a health expert nearby that verified your opinions? With the support of an expert, your opinion would now be held in higher regards by others. Similarly, you have a small niche site on health; Google isn’t going to see you as much of an authority. But if you got a link from an authoritative health site…I think you get the idea.

If you are getting a ton of backlinks from non-expert, non-authoritative sources it is going to take a lot of links to achieve anywhere near the results you want. You can improve your rankings somewhat effectively with these types of links, but it takes a ton of them. To compare backlinks with real life again; how many people would it take to convince you of a stranger’s opinion if none of these people seemed qualified to make judgments about said stranger’s opinions? 5, 10, 200, 1,000? In other words, you would probably demand the support of many people if none of them were experts in order to trust this stranger. In the same fashion, Google is not quick to trust and increase the rank of sites with just profile links and other non-authoritative links. However, each one does count a little bit, and I mean a little bit.

We always want to aim for quality over quantity. Vast quantities of low quality backlinks can help, but the core of your link building strategy should revolve around acquiring high quality backlinks. These quality links also often send traffic to your site which is a huge added benefit. You’re not going to get any additional traffic from profile backlinks which is going to leave you entirely reliant upon Google and the other search engines. Most people find a balance in their link building efforts between the two. Find what works for you, and stick to with it until you hit the top.

Guest Author: Ben Jackson is an SEO expert/enthusiast and founder of www.seodiscovery.org.

After a partnership agreement was signed exactly one year ago, Yahoo! has finally started testing organic and paid listings from Microsoft Bing this week. Yahoo! states if all goes as planned, users should expect Yahoo!’s organic search results to be powered by Bing around August/September.

The organic search transition will happen automatically. However, if you perform SEO on your site and ranking high in these search engines is important to you, I recommend keeping a close eye on any updates and tips from both Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Yahoo has already provided its users with three valuable tips:

1. Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that work best for you.
2. Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate.
3. Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimize your website for the Microsoft platform crawler, as Bing listings will be displayed for approximately 30% of search queries after this change, according to comScore.

I also found the Yahoo! FAQ page to be extremely helpful in answering some the questions I had.

Here’s to a smooth transition!

Your brand, industry, and competitors are being discussed online whether you use social media or not. Actively monitoring what people are saying about you, your brand, your industry, and your competitors has many benefits, including protecting your brand reputation, discovering what customers want and need, learning of new opportunities, staying on top of competition, avoiding disasters, and measuring ROI.

Below are 25 monitoring tools that won’t cost you anything to use, and will help you gain a wealth of knowledge about your brand, influencers, prospects, customers, competitors, and much more.

1. Backtype – Get alerts of where your competitors are promoting their website and who they are interacting with.
2. Bit.ly – Shorten and track how many clicked on and retweeted your links.
3. BlogPulse – Get data from blogs, news posts and other online content that include you or your competitors in the conversation.
4. BoardTracker – Search forums and discussion boards or set up alerts that will tell you when and how often people mention a particular search term.
5. DomainTools – Get a report on a website’s domain information.
6. Google Alerts – Set up email alerts of target keywords or phrases that are important to you, your brand, and industry.
7. Google Analytics – See where your website traffic is coming from, what pages are being visited, what keywords are being used to find you, etc.
8. Google Video – Find videos on a specific topic, competitor videos, etc.
9. Jodange – Track consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web.
10. Klout – Measure who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on.
11. Knowem – Check and reserve your brand, product, personal name or username on social media websites.
12. Monitter – Find out what people are saying in real-time on Twitter.
13. Oodle – Discover competitors’ plans for the future by monitoring the types of jobs they post online.
14. Quarkbase – See traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity about websites.
15. SEO for Firefox – Find out a site’s PageRank, age, number of links at a certain domain/page, if it’s listed in certain directories etc.
16. SEOPro Link Checker – Find out which sites link back to your website as well as your competitors’ sites.
17. SocialMention – Check and get alerts on what people are saying about a term across different blogs and social outlets.
18. Technorati – Find industry bloggers, influencers, and monitor who mentions you or your competitors in the blogosphere.
19. Trendrr – Find out how your brand or product is trending in real time compared to others.
20. Tweetburner – Shorten and track URLs on Twitter and Friendfeed.
21. Twendz – Track conversation and user sentiment on Twitter in real-time.
22. Twinfluence – Measure the combined influence of tweeps and their followers.
23. Twitter Search – Using keywords and phrases, search what people have discussed on Twitter.
24. Xinu – Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics
25. Yahoo Site Explorer – Discover who is linking to you and your competitors.

Of course, it does not stop with these. There are hundreds of tools out there! In another blog post, I will discuss the paid monitoring tools.

What tools do you use? Which free tools did I miss?

Trying to figure out which social bookmarking sites to use can rapidly become overwhelming with the sheer number of choices available. To make things a little easier, I’ve narrowed them down to 15 sites that really are worth checking out.

1. Digg
Despite complaints about the notoriously short attention span of the majority of Diggers, this remains the number one social bookmarking site.

2. StumbleUpon
A friendlier way to connect with people and share favorite sites, StumbleUpon is easy to use and a true social bookmarker.

3. Propeller
One of the best sites for business use, Propeller tends to focus on sites of interest to older males in business for themselves.

4. Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is the oldest bookmarking site around, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of date. Millions of people use it still and the site has a simple, easy to use format.

5. Blinklist
This social bookmarking service is well used and tends to focus on marketing and media, with no restrictions as to which webpages you can tag.

6. Reddit
Offering a personalized groups feature where you can save sites for those in your group to see, Reddit is an oldie, but a goodie.

7. Blipoo
If you are looking for a site that allows self-promotion, Blipoo is the place for you. The site leans heavily toward blog promo.

8. Buddymarks
This site offers three options for saving your bookmarks, personal use only, sharing within a group, or open social bookmarking.

9. Diigo
Hailed as “social bookmarking on steroids”, this site offers heavy duty bookmarking options for the serious surfer.

10. Yahoo! Buzz
This site works similar to Digg in that you can vote your favorite sites up and the worst ones down, plus the Yahoo name makes it a little more valuable.

11. Slashdot
Perfect for bookmarking technical information, this site also has clout with Google, making it a good place for tech business news.

12. Mixx
Here’s a site that is multi-purpose, allowing for submission in a wide range of categories to be voted for by users.

13. Furl
Furl has plenty of Google juice and for this reason, it’s a fairly popular choice among marketers and internet based businesses.

14. PlugIM
A site that offers bookmarking services to internet marketers and lets you submit content, vote stories up and make friends for a full networking experience.

15. ListerLister
Our final social bookmarking site, ListerLister is a site that not only promotes bookmarks, but forming communities based on common interests.

Which social bookmarking sites do you use and what is your favorite?