Last month I told you about our monthly educational podcast series focused on helping you generate better results from your Web stores. You may remember our first one, "Converting Shoppers to Buyers." This month the focus is on practical tips to help you increase results from your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

SEO, as well as the rest of the alphabet soup of acronyms in the search marketing world, can seem very difficult and confusing. But, it's a very important marketing channel for all Websites and even more for e-commerce businesses like yours, so I thought this would be a great topic for our monthly podcast.

The search marketing firm we use, Prominent Placement, has helped us make a lot of progress with out SEO strategies - in a very unintimidating way. So we asked Stacy Williams, managing partner, Prominent Placement, if she would be willing to share some practical best practices with you too. Stacy has been focused on search marketing for more than 10 years - well before most of us had ever heard about it! So she is truly a pioneer and expert in this arena.

Below are a few of the takeaways I learned - mostly what NOT to do - but I encourage you to listen to the podcast so that you can capture the tips that make the most sense for your business.

• If it is seems too easy it probably is! For example, you may run across link farms or automated ways to drive more inbound leads to your site - avoid these. It is worth the time and effort to build quality, relevant inbounds links to your Website.
• Don't try to trick the system. A common way some companies try to trick the search engines is by including invisible links or hidden text on their Web pages. If the search engines haven't detected this yet, they most certainly will. Search engines will punish bad behavior by dropping your site's ranking, removing all other listings except for your company name or even black listing your site completely.
• Flash is ignored by the search engines. A little flash on your site is fine, such as a small video included on an html page. The search engines will simply skip over the flash element on the page and crawl the html. Don't create your entire site in flash or use it as a splash opening to your site - the search engines won't find it.

In the podcast you will also learn the top five "musts" of effective SEO and how to stay on top of the ever changing trends. There is a lot of information out there, but Stacy does a great job of recommending reliable and quality resources you can reference.

Check out the podcast and let me know what you think, by commenting about this blog post. You can access the podcast by visiting https://www.controlscan.com/podcasts/effective_seo.php. I hope some of the recommendations described in the podcast will help you increase the effectiveness of your SEO strategies!

‘Til Next Time,

Joan
The eSecurity Diva