Many ecommerce sites often make the mistake of focusing on the wrong set of SEO metrics. While certain aspects might still hold their relevance today, a lot has changed since a couple of years back. With new concepts like LSI, social shopping and other concepts gaining momentum, it is time your ecommerce SEO strategy changed with the times!

Trophy keywords

This is totally passé these days. With prominent search engines like Google and Yahoo moving towards LSI techniques and user-centric search results, it no longer pays to focus on only a handful of popular keywords. Variation is the key and the more diverse your keywords and the more you play around with them the higher is your chance at being noticed on these search engines.

Recycled content

Let’s face it. A majority of content on the internet these days is recycled. There is only so much you can churn out originally and almost all content is already available online. Many ecommerce site owners spend endless nights worrying over plagiarism issues. The fact is, almost all sites duplicate content and you will definitely see a common thread of similarity amongst content of these sites.

Sitemap XML

This used to be a big life saver for ecommerce sites in the earlier days. Ecommerce site owners would use their sitemap XML files to restore indexing problems. Try that tactic now and you are quickly on the way to becoming obsolete! Even if you were to use sitemap XML files, your site rankings would not improve in any way.

Link exchanges

It is all very good to say that link exchanges are crucial and the barter system still works to the advantage of ecommerce sites. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially in these changing times. The world of ecommerce is seeing a quick shift in the way links are being perceived. With social networking sites becoming more popular, link exchanges have become almost redundant. If users like your content, they will automatically bookmark and pick you out, thereby raising your rankings online. Hence, link exchanges seem to play no prominent role in enhancing the SEO-friendly quotient of an ecommerce site!

Social media sites work!

News sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon etc. are big names in the world of social networking and marketing. If you want your ecommerce site or your business to be taken seriously by the social networking community, you need to be an active contributor to such sites. The dividends are worth the time spent contributing to such sites.

Building your social networking base

It pays to have contacts, especially in the social media sites. Viral marketing through social media sites has become a big thing with ecommerce sites. Sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, Flickr, MyBlogRoll and others offer business owners to connect and build their database of contacts. It couldn’t get easier and more effective than this! As more people come in contact with you and the word of mouth spreads about your business, you will get more enquiries, posts and visits to your ecommerce site.

Link baiting: a powerful strategy

Instead of seeking out popular keywords, today the all-new strategy of SEO is to use link baiting techniques. The concept is simple. Basically, you use link baiting tools and software to scour through millions of websites. Whenever a site has keywords, which are coordinated with your ecommerce site’s theme, you can hyperlink those phrases to your site. This saves you the hassle of procuring keywords and you spread your message across diverse sites across the internet.

Yield of keywords

The extent to which your keywords are generating traffic is called the keyword yield. You should be looking at this crucial SEO parameter. This will help you to know, which keywords are popular as well as traffic drawing.

Index to crawling

This refers to the number of pages indexed as compared to the unique pages, which have been crawled by robots. The higher is this ratio, the more is your ranking online.

Yield of search engines

This SEO metric refers to the amount of traffic generated by a particular search engine. Since audience sizes differ from one search engine to another, it helps to keep track of traffic from different engines. While there maybe more pages crawled from one search engine, the yield of traffic could be much higher for other search engines.

This is of course an iterative process at the end of which, you would realize higher traffic volumes and more sales. In addition, your site rankings are expected to shoot up dramatically.