External links
Google takes into account that your shop is part of the internet and regards how your shop is linked to other web pages. If you do not have any incoming links, Google will not find or index your "island", even if you register the URL of your home page with Google manually!
How to link
Back-links have the most important effect on your site's relevance for search engines. These are links to your shop from other web pages. These not only includes links to the home page of your shop but more importantly, links to subpages such as categories and products. Every link to your site's pages signals to the search engine that your shop contains a relevant offering and deserves a prominent place in the search results.
The link text plays an important role. If the search term is contained in the link text, the search engine assumes that the target of the link—your shop or web page—contains content which is relevant to the search term. This means that an external web page should not link to your shop like this:
<a href="http://<domain>/epages/ShopName>.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=Categories/Tents/FamilyTents">click here</a>
But rather like this:
<a href="http://domain>/epages/ShopName>.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=Categories/Tents/FamilyTents">Family tents</a>
or better (using the short URL):
<a href="http://<domain>/family_tents">Family tents</a>
The link text is "Family tents" and forwards to the relevant category page in your shop when clicked. To pass links on, use the "Links to external" beneath the "Short URL" field.
Embedding the link in a small text message or advert is even better. These increase the relevance. The text message should include relevant content and use the required search terms. This has the advantage for the search engine that the search term and the message text are both contained in the link text and are close to each other on the page. This proximity is considered in the ranking:
Find equipment for camping holidays at Milestones. Our special offer for the month:
<a href="http://domain>/epages/ShopName>.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=Categories/Tents/FamilyTents">Family tents</a>
Good places for links of this sort are busy forums where the content is changing constantly to stay up-to-date. These are visited often by search engines. Blogs are also good for this. However, some blogs and forums do not allow posts to contain links or use rel="nofollow" to bar these.
When buying banners and text adverts, make sure that the link does not contain a "rel=nofollow" attribute (search engines are stopped here) and also that the link does not forward over an ad server or a link script. Take a look at the existing adverts of the provider (does the link in the advert point to the customer's page directly?) or, if in doubt, ask. The position of links on the page is also crucial. A link in the footer or at the bottom of a sidebar does not help as much as one higher in the content area. There should also not be lots of other links on the page since this would diminish the value of your own link. Convince the operator of the other page about the long-term nature of the offer—the older the link, the better. Google assumes that "older" links are more honest.
It is generally true that if you do not want to pay for all back-links and do not want to be excluded from forums because of adverts for your own shop, you must provide good reasons for voluntarily linking to your e-commerce site. Offer content other than your products or services such as information pages and specialist articles about general topics in your line of business or an archive of past newsletters. This increases the chance that other users will link to you from their pages. The search engine will then notice your increased popularity in the internet. Your creativity and sector know-how is required here. No one will simply link to your product pages without a reason. Other content-based incentives must exist to encourage this in order to receive links to informational pages. Then, at least the user will visit your site. You can find examples of how to get links like this under the term Link bait on the internet.
And: search engines regard links which are created "naturally", better.
Of course, you should use the export of your products to various product portals (for example, Pangora, Shopping.com, Google Merchant Center) that you find in your shop administration under Marketing >> Product portals.
Link source
The source of the link accounts for 50% of the rating. It is important who links to your pages. (Don't buy 20 million links at eBay for 19.95. That does not help and actually hinders your site!) Important is the domain from which the back-link comes. Back-links to a British shop should come from a British domain (.uk Therefore, even if you own a .com domain, but the server is in Germany, it will be harder in the American Google index if you do not have only American customers (you can then convert this assignment in the Google webmaster tools). Google works internally with the IP addresses assigned to the domains. The first three number blocks of the IP addresses must be different. Differences in the last number block (the D block) do not count: 123.456.789.xxx (You can find out the IP address of a domain by entering ping <domain> in the command prompt). Google rates multiple links that come from one domain the same as a single link. Therefore, you need as many links as possible from different domains.
Links from .edu domains have an especially positive effect. Perhaps you can sponsor them and receive links in return.
"If you link to me, I'll link to you" isn't really a worthwhile practice. One-way links are evaluated more positively than links in both directions. Use a "triangle of links" instead: A à B, B à C, and C à A.
Look at the cache date for a page where you buy a link (view with cache:URL). If the date is older than a month, it is not very valuable.
To increase the quality and number of links, you must plan in enough time. It would be frivolous to claim that immense progress can be achieved here within a few days.
Press releases
Even if you do not know the editor of a trade journal for your sector, press releases can get the attention of bloggers and journalists. In addition to fee-based online portals for press releases, there are also free portals, although these must fulfil the requirements above as well (for example, links have to have rel="nofollow" attributes)—the press release should of course have a link to your pages. You can link to your home page, or, if it fits the text better, to one of your sub-pages. Online press portals have a relatively high page rank and are indexed often by the search engines because of their continual updates. But do not expect many visitors from press portals. Note that the same press release at multiple portals can be rated as duplicate content, which is negative. Perhaps you can change the release a little bit for each portal. Examples of online press portals (at some, registration is necessary) are:
Link farms and other unfair methods
Google has a number of strict rules for the owners of web pages including shop owners. Link farms, link purchases, hidden links (using CSS), and doorway pages are prohibited. Although an automatic method to recognise these does not exist, competitors often report unfair methods to Google using the spam report button. Often, links to pages which have been reported like this are not evaluated. In exceptional cases (for example explicit spam pages), web sites are downgraded or even removed from the index as a punishment. Be careful when dealing with dubious "page optimisers". You should not link to a link farm yourself, of course.
Even the last Google change, the so-called Panda update, showed that the leading search engine prefers “human” pages and behaviour and gives pages that appear more mechanical a lower rating.
Before buying expensive back-links, make sure to find out as much as possible about them, for example in SEO forums. Examples of these are:
Web pages which are predominantly linked to from pages with a high PageRank (>5) or demonstrate a sudden, unnatural increase in links (for example 2,000 links at once) are looked at suspiciously for "unfair methods" by the "eyes" of the search engines. In these cases, Google checks manually for possible legitimate reasons for this, such as an article on
www.bbc.co.uk with a link to a previously relatively unknown page. However, if the suspicion is confirmed, the page is downgraded in the ranking as a punishment. A natural link network usually consists of a large number of pages with a low page rank and a small percentage of pages with a high page rank.
If the back-links contain identical link texts, this can also arouse suspicion. This does not happen in a natural link network—there are always variations.
Check up on it!
Check regularly to see which of your pages have been indexed by a search engine. Go to the search engine page and enter the following in the search field: site:<yourdomain> . The search results will contain all the pages in your shop (maximum 1,000) that are contained in the search engine's index. If you would like to confirm whether a specific page is in the index, you can do so using info: <URL>.
You can also check to see which external domains link to your pages and how many of these the search engine is aware of.
In Google: link:<your domain> (however, Google deliberately only includes some back-links. In the Google Webmaster tools, you can get a more detailed overview.)
For Yahoo: Use the Site Explorer (
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) and enter your domain. The site explorer offers many services and filters that can be used for your domain, for example with
linkdomain:www.xyz.com -site:www.xyz.com
Various SEO tools which you can use to analyze your domain can be found at:
http://www.linkvendor.com as well as an add-on for the Firefox browser at: