Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important competence for any business that intends to attract customers to a web presence. Effective - or ineffective - SEO increasingly determines whether your customers or an audience finds you - or not - as they conduct relevant research.
In particularly, e-commerce businesses live and die by their site's ranking in popular search engines due to the frequency with which purcahse decisions are beginning as keyword searches on those portals.
Although we have found that pay-per-click (PPC) or other paid advertising can and does affect organic traffic results,an important step for businesses desiring greater web traffic involves selecting appropriate keywords to market one's site under.
Keyword selection is the cornerstone of your campaign. It's impossible to come up on the first page of search results for every possible word or phrase, and as such, you should not count on that or even attempt to achieve it.
Best Practices on Keyword Selection
First, keywords do not have to be single words. In fact, longer keywords increase relevancy and reduce competition, even if they do reduce search volume.
Certianly, it is a good idea to select keywords that represent your web offering and/or capabilities. However, an important consideration is the popularity/competition of a particular keyword. "Selling books online" might be a good keyword, but you will be starting behind the first thousand pages of Amazon.com-related results.
Link-building and Other Important SEO Tactics
Once keywords are selected, an SEO professional can go to work in building links to the site. The general idea is that the better the quality (and corresponding PageRank) of the sites that link to your site, the greater the influence of that link on your site's PageRank and search engine position.
Many other variables come into play in the success of an SEO effort, including writing excellent content (and doing it often), following proper link structure, choosing appropriate page-titles, and considering other easily overlooked aspects of site creation. If not done from the start with a healthy process, the effort and cost put into optimization of content will only be marginally different than redoing a site from scratch.
Also, the earlier your site is search engine-savvy, the earlier you can get your desired results, and the earlier you can surpass them. While it will take 1-2 months for Google, Yahoo, et. al. to update your site's rankings, a noticeable increase in search engine rank will eventually show up, and it will likely be a dramatic change for your targeted keywords. At this point, the process begins again, using analytical tools to measure the traffic won/lost and to identify further opportunities to pursue.