Benefits of Comparison Shopping Websites

For most, having an e-commerce business is tough…especially in this economy. What’s even harder is actually getting traffic/people to your website. Instead of placing sponsored links in Google or Yahoo!, which could cost thousands, try listing yourself on some comparison shopping websites like Shozilla.com or Shopping.com for a small fee. A lot of people nowadays are less brand loyal and are only looking for the best deal. Most people who are looking to buy something through Shopzilla are really only interested in price (and reviews), otherwise they could just do a general search in Google and find the first listing that sells the item they are looking for.

Generating sales is not the only benefit from using these comparison shopping websites. When people see your listing, they’ll click on your listing. When they click on your listing, it takes them directly to your product page. The traffic you receive from these comparison shopping websites can greatly influence your SEO. The more traffic you receive, the better your search engine rankings - among other factors but that requires another blog post. Website traffic ties into how search engines rank your website. If a website has no traffic the search engines don’t regard it as important and thus, you get shoved to the end.

So if you are looking for sales while still helping your organic listing, try Shopzilla.com for a month and see what happens. Of course the lower the prices on your products the easier it will be for people to find your products if they are searching by price.

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as “SEO,” is an enhanced service whereby you optimize the webpages of a website as per the rules of the search engines and help the search engine identify a webpage that is important to a particular set of keywords. This technique allows you to organically increase your search engine rankings. There are hundreds of techniques you could implement to organically increase your rankings in the search engines. However, the foundation to good SEO practice is to create good meta tags for each page of your website.

Explaining what search engines are, in this day and age, would probably be a waste of time since most of us not only use them on a daily basis, but a new word has even been coined to define this activity; "just Google it"!

A perhaps more useful (and relevant) thing to ask would be, how do I get my website ranked as high as possible so that people can find it quick and easy? Unless you're a national brand, whom people would be searching for by name, chances are you want your website to generate top listings based on keywords. In other words, if your company manufactures, sells, or has anything to do with "wonder widgets", you'd want people searching the Internet on this topic to hopefully find your site listed near the top of the search results.

What is search engine optimization?

SEO, as it is called for short, is the process by which a website is analyzed, optimized and ultimately picked up by search engines for indexing.

Not convinced yet? Let's try this definition, quoted from About.com:

"Search engine optimization, in a nutshell, is the process of overseeing the development or re-development of a website, so that it will naturally attract traffic by securing top ranking on the major search engines/directories for selected search terms and phrases"

Still not sure? Ok, let's try again. Search engines have their very own criteria by which they deem any given website's relevancy to a search that's being performed. Such criteria vary from search engine to search engine, and change over time. Thus, a true SEO project is ongoing; it cannot be said that an effective SEO technique is performed once, successful as it may be, and then stop.

It is not enough to obtain a high ranking as it is equally important to maintain it!

How exactly does SEO work?

To not hide behind words, SEO is a quest to beat the search engines at their own game. And, as the old adage goes, it is important to know one's enemy; enemy, in an affectionate way, of course. We need the search engines to sort out the never-ending billions of websites on the Internet.

What are Search Engine Spiders?

Search engine spiders are computer programs with specific algorithms that identify websites across the Internet and scan the website’s code to figure out how to include it in their index and how it relates to search terms. All search engines have their own spiders that “crawl” websites. Larger search engines have multiple spiders continuously crawling the Internet each day. Anytime a search engine spider crawls your website, it means the search engine is updating its listings of websites that are already included in the index or to scan new content or add websites for the first time.