So how do you get your florist ecommerce site visible by search engines? How can Search Engine Optimization and how can it help your site? This is the first in a series where we talk about how you can improve your florist ecommerce website to garner more hits from search engines.

The key to raising your site’s rank in search engines is Google’s PageRank — a measure of your site’s and site pages’ importance. This ranking rises largely based on how many sites are pointing to yours and how important those sites are. You can check your page ranking on this site.

Check your florist ecommerce site for free on this Google PageRank viewer

Internal linking plays a key role in the PageRank. Pages on your site that have the higest number of links from other pages on your site will get the highest internal ranking. Typically the homepage (index.html) will have the highest ranking.

External links are the main drivers of your florist site’s PageRank. Take the  search results for the word “rose” for example. The first page that comes up in Google is a Wikipedia entry on roses– and the reason is because that page has the highest number of other sites (and the highest number of important sites like the New York Times and USA Today) with pages about roses pointing to that Wikipedia entry.

So how do you raise the number of external links pointing to your site?

Incentivize Customer Reviews: Start by getting your customers to write reviews of your site in online directories like Yelp, InsiderPages, and others. Think about creative ways to encourage good reviews, including discounts and prize drawings.

Buy Online Advertising: Online advertising from reputable sites like YellowPages.com actually increases your search engine ranking as well.

Post Videos: Post informational videos of about your company, including commercials, interviews with staff, and how-to segments on sites like YouTube. Create a “channel” for your business.

Court Publicity: Most important of all, you need to court publicity from your local newspapers and links from local, city-specific websites. Because these sites will typically have a high PageRank themselves, they will drive significant number of hits and increase your ranking.

Your site’s PageRank is mostly driven by the number of external links pointing to your site — make this the focus of your efforts to promote your website.

Tags: Ecommerce, SEO

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Ecommerce, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.