5 Winning Ways to Optimize Your Online Store

5 Winning Ways to Optimize Your Online Store

Business is booming in the world of eCommerce and just about anyone can set up an online storefront – even on the slimmest of shoestring budgets. Success depends on making sure potential customers can find your store and receive the best possible shopping experience when they visit. Paid publicity can help, but there are a number of things you can do to optimize your store for maximum visibility right on your website without spending a dime. Here’s a look at five low-cost ways to increase traffic to your website and boost customer engagement.

Optimize Your Store for Organic Search

Paid advertising and other kinds of marketing strategies can play an important part in promoting your new online shop, but it’s also essential to make a plan to rank high in organic searches by practicing search engine optimization – the natural way that people search for information or products online. These searches respond to keywords or questions submitted to search engines like Google or Bing and deliver the best matches to the searcher. Ranking high – on the first page of search results – is the goal of just about every online business, since nearly two-thirds of searchers never click to the second page of their search results.

Long-tail keywords aren’t the only criteria for ranking high or improving your online presence through search engine optimization. Google and other search engines operate on a mysterious algorithm system that also factors in many other features of a website when assigning rankings. These can include a site’s authority, which can be established by quality backlinks, or links back to the site by other reputable websites, and the quality of the user experience it offers visitors. That’s why Google’s recent algorithm changes heavily penalized spammy, keyword stuffed sites with low value to visitors.

Learning how to optimize your website for easy searching and engaging user experience can not only boost your search engine rankings but also establish your site as an authority in your niche and enhance your brand’s visibility. Additionally, you don’t need to be an expert in web design and development to make small but significant changes that will make your site more search friendly.

Include Quality Content – Everywhere

If you visited a brick and mortar store and found empty shelves, a vacant front window and no one available to serve you, you would probably turn around and leave. The same is true for your online store. Make sure that your product pages include a range of products, not just one or two, and that they’re packed with keyword rich descriptions of your products and organized in intuitive ways. Add featured content, testimonials, or reviews to a visually appealing homepage. Add a blog to your site and keep it updated with a mix of topical and evergreen content that is relevant to your customers’ interests and needs.

Since search engine crawlers regularly search sites for new, relevant content, having an active, interactive site that is updated on a regular basis shows visitors and search engines that your store is a thriving online concern.

Make Your Store Interactive

Search engines also consider factors such as “dwell time,” – the amount of time a visitor spends on your site and what they do there – in search rankings. Making sure your site is attractive and easy to navigate can encourage visitors to stick around, but you can also engage visitors by encouraging them to interact with your store and your brand. Adding features such as comments and live chat can encourage them to ask questions and express opinions. Consider showcasing customer content, such as sharing product photos, or running contests for things like naming new products. Beyond selling products, these kinds of strategies can build brand awareness and create a loyal tribe of supporters willing to share your content with others.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

More than half of all online shopping now takes place from mobile devices, rather than desktop or laptop computers. For that reason, Google and other search engines now consider mobile responsiveness a key factor in higher search rankings. Consider installing a mobile-responsive theme for your WordPress site, or add a plugin to make an existing theme more mobile friendly. To improve the mobile experience, even more, eliminate intrusive “interstitial,” content such as large popups or overlays that block a user’s view of your pages.

Use Keywords Where It Counts

Although Google penalizes poor quality and keyword stuffed sites, it rewards sites that use keywords smartly. Incorporate keywords, especially “long tail,” keywords of four or more words, into key areas of your site, including page and post titles, headers, subheaders, and product descriptions. Don’t forget to add them to image alt text and site metadata, and set custom URLs for all pages, so that they include keywords rather than default strings of numbers.

Include Navigation Tools and Site Maps

Make sure navigation and user tools, such as your site’s menus, are up to date and point clearly to the relevant content – a key feature for making your site easier for visitors to navigate. Make sure that contact information and other essentials about your store and your products are easily visible. Submit a site map to Google, as well. A site map includes all the pages on your site, with their relevant keywords, and helps to ensure that all the pages on your site will be crawled for indexing. If you change or update content on the site, be sure to update your site map too, so that it stays current.

It’s never been easier to open your own online store, thanks to an array of free and paid tools for building your dream website and reaching potential customers from around the world. You can optimize your new storefront for maximum search visibility and user-friendliness from within your website using resources you already have – all for free, no development experience or digital marketing budget required.

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Is WordPress Only for Blogs?

Is WordPress Only for Blogs?

WordPress powers over a quarter of the world’s websites, including many, ranked in the web’s top 100. Although this free, open source site builder was originally designed for blogging, WordPress is now the platform of choice, not only for personal and business blogs but also for many other kinds of sites.

With the help of thousands of WordPress themes, plugins, and extensions, users of all skill levels can build in all the functions they need to create online stores, portfolios, membership sites, professional pages, and more. Versatile, flexible, and endlessly customizable, WordPress isn’t just for blogging anymore.

WordPress Makes Publishing Possible

WordPress was developed back in 2003 as a tool intended for bloggers – a way to make online publishing accessible to everyone, according to its founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. That’s why WordPress remains free, an open source software platform that can be modified and shared by anyone in the worldwide WordPress community.

In the years that followed, WordPress was welcomed not only by bloggers looking for flexibility and control in a full-featured content management system, but also by entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals in fields of all kinds who found that the basic WordPress platform could be adapted to meet the needs of many different types of sites. That’s because the three core WordPress elements – source code, themes, and plugins – can be modified, mixed, and matched to create unique, highly customized websites, even by users with no experience in website development.

WordPress Has Tools for Blogging – and Beyond

Many site owners do use WordPress for blog posts, and the origins of WordPress as a blogging tool is clear in its content editor, which is oriented toward creating text. With a clean, minimal text box that comes in both visual and HTML formats to meet the needs of both new users and experienced developers, the content editor is the key to fleshing out the basic WordPress structure with a full complement of pages, blog posts, and other elements. The basic WordPress content editor reflects its origins as a blogging tool with its array of text formatting tools, but it also offers options for adding images and embedding the video.

The content editor can be extended with plugins that add a variety of other content management tools for further customization options like visual elements through slideshows and galleries. And as WordPress has evolved toward a wider functionality, tools, such as the plugin Elementor and the new block-based editor Gutenberg, allows users to take a more visual approach to create content overall.

The WordPress Code Provides the Structure

The basic WordPress “package” is always free, and it can be downloaded from WordPress.org and installed on any web host. It consists of a set of HTML files that define the core functions of a WordPress site, and that includes the content editor – the essential tool for creating a site’s posts and pages.

In all its forms, though, WordPress remains an open source software, which means that individual WordPress users are free to modify it as needed for their own sites or to share those modifications with others. Experienced web developers can work directly with the source code to add features or alter the appearance of the site through different customization options, and new users can use preset customization features available with WordPress themes and plugins to get the look and feel they want.

WordPress Themes Customize the Look

The WordPress source code establishes the structure and essential functionality of your site, but its appearance is defined by its chosen theme – and there are thousands of WordPress free and premium themes to choose from. Many are available from the official WordPress theme directory, but more can be purchased – or downloaded for free – from WordPress developers around the globe.

WordPress themes allow users to expand the functionality of a site in many different directions, with themes designed for blogging, e-commerce, creative portfolios, and more. New users can customize a theme’s presets through settings on the site’s admin dashboard, while more experienced developers can make changes directly to its style sheets and scripts.

Plugins and Extensions Add More Functions

Plugins are the third essential element of the WordPress blogging platform, and they can be installed in any WordPress site to add niche-specific functions that turn a basic WordPress install into an online store, photo gallery, landing page, or any other kind of business or professional site.

Plugins allow WordPress users to add contact forms, collect money, create social networks, display their social media, and build online magazines. For example, e-commerce plugins like WooCommerce can add a complete online shop to your WordPress site. Gallery plugins allow photographers, artists, and other creatives to showcase their work. Additionally, a variety of business-oriented plugins add functions such as statistics, database management, and other functions for small and large companies.

Plugins can be installed directly into your WordPress theme from the official Plugin Directory, or they can be purchased separately from developers and asset marketplaces, and then uploaded to your WordPress install. Plugins can be customized through their setting options, and premium plugins typically offer user support, tutorials, and other features.

Many plugins also come with the option of extensions: add-ons that provide even more functions on top of the basic ones. Plugins combined with extensions allow users to customize sites even more, so that it is possible to create virtually any kind of site, for any purpose, from a basic WordPress install. As the digital world evolves, new plugins are constantly being developed to add even more options for customizing WordPress sites.
WordPress may have started as a blogging platform to make the tools of online publishing available to anyone, not just experienced website developers, but thanks to its flexibility it has become much more than that. Today’s WordPress users range from newcomers to denizens of the blogosphere, to multinational corporations with complex websites that don’t even include a blog. All of these unique sites are based on the WordPress source code. With the core code files combined with themes and plugins that add the specialized functions you need, your WordPress website can be anything you want it to be – even a blog.

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