Businesses on the Internet today can rise and fall with the power of search. To survive in this search-based economy, a business must be able to be found easily on google search, have a location in Bing maps to navigate too, and a phone number that can be easily brought up in a yellow-pages query. The problem is that the format of the web is also changing — changing from the once-static HTML and hyperlink model to a sleeker dynamic page model, where many factors can determine the type of content being shown, whether it’s videos, downloads, pictures, flash animations, or plain HTML.
This dynamic aspect of the web can make it difficult for search engines to find and index your website, because search engines don’t try to input values or guess how to find the page. Search engines only follow links inside of pages, an activity known as “crawling”. Crawling dynamic pages is difficult and can even hurt search ratings if there is an error in the site. This is where Search Engine Optimization Software (SEO) comes in.
SEO software is designed to help webmasters design more search-friendly and user-friendly sites by guiding them along search and search engine best practices. One of these SEO software offerings is the Endeca SEO module, part of Endeca’s Commerce Suite of software.
Endeca’s SEO module is designed from the ground up to increase search revenues, strengthen the effectiveness of ad campaigns, and reduce burdens on IT teams by allowing business units to update and create content. It’s an effective electronic campagin manager for your website that can greatly reduce the amount of work you do while increasing your capacity to do business. It does this mainly through Site-mapping, Page-building, and Keyword generation.
Page Relationships and Site-maps:
Like Google, Endeca’s SEO optimization software determines what pages are linking to other pages. By discovering determining relationships between pages, it can determine which pages link to each other and the relationship between them. To take an example from their informational video, if you have a basketball apparel website, and have a page that links to all the different basketball shoes that you sell, the software will quickly recognize that the basketball shoes page that displays all the different brands is a major entry point for consumers. The software will then submit this page to be indexed by search engines.
The SEO module can also determine major searches inside of your website, and create and submit pages based on those searches with a template that the webmaster designs. It’s a process that can help users get to where they need to go on the site more quickly and effectively.
This process of generating information about links also creates a sitemap, which are used by search engines like Google and Yahoo for proper page indexing. Sitemaps inform the search engines when to crawl the website again for updates, which pages will likely be changed, and the priority of the URL’s in your site. This will keep your search information more current and your potential customers more informed about your products and services.
Longtail Keyword Strategy:
During the sitemapping and crawling process the SEO module begins to build keywords that represent your website. One of the keyword startegies that can be implemented by Endeca is the use of “Long-Tail” keywords. Long-Tail keywords are less-commonly searched terms that can be leveraged in greater amounts to net more traffic. This quantity over quality approach can be better because it means less struggling around top keywords that already have entrenched competition.
As an example, it will be easier to become the top search result for “small vinyl baseball bat stickers” than it will be to become top search result for “baseball stickers”. This method has the added benefit of being able to take your potential customers straight to where they need to go in your site as well, using methods built into the Endeca PageBuilder.
PageBuilder
By utilizing the Endeca PageBuilder, buisness users can create content based on rules, templates, and modules created by IT users. This means that IT isn’t constantly creating new pages or programs for the website and coming back for feedback. Instead, business members can create or edit pages with templates and modules created by IT and see their creations added to the website. Modules included with the Endeca product include Search functions and Product Spotlighting.
The Endeca SEO module can be a great asset and addition to any IT arsenal with a sales website. In fact, Endeca has already helped out some high-profile companies such as Ford, AutoTrader.com, and Walmart optimize their websites to increase their traffic and sales ratios.
A Short Glossary of Terms:
SEO — Search Engine Optimization. The process by which websites increase traffic, conversion rates, and search prevalence.
Dynamic page — a page that uses information supplied by the user in some manner. Dynamic pages typically are easy to spot by looking in the browser bar for &’s and ?’s.
Longtail — The name of the strategy where webmasters use more less-searched terms based off of a popular keyword in order to grab the “tail” of the more popularly searched term.
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