There are an estimated 1.5 billion sites currently available on the web today with each one of them competing to be found on the first page of search engines.

The drive to be on the first page of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) is growing keener by the day because the average organic traffic share of the first page on Google is 91.5 percent while the second page sometimes records as low as 4.8 percent.

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It is therefore not surprising that many businesses are increasing their budgetary allocations into mapping out a good SEO checklist for their online stores.

Most small businesses do not have the financial muscle to compete with big businesses in the SEO game. But how about achieving the same result or even better with a very low budget? This article will show you how to use one simple app to win the SEO game.

How SEO works

Before your site can be optimized for search engines, it has to be indexed. Search engines crawl through the web to index content and optimize them for quick discovery whenever there is a search query. The factors that "crawlers" consider include the relevance of the content and the popularity of the site.

Search engines can interpret the relevance of a site if the site has the appropriate keywords in major areas such as page titles, meta description, ALT tags, and the page’s body content.

Another thing crawlers consider is the presence of a sitemap.xml file, which is a list of pages on a site that Google and other search engines follow to index your site.

Not getting your AJAX/JavaScript right may result in your site not being indexed by search engines. Even though Google indexes JavaScript and AJAX, these languages are not as easily indexable as HTML. So, if by any chance you incorrectly configure your AJAX pages and JavaScript execution, Google will not index the pages.

A site may also not be indexed because you might have unintentionally blocked search engines from accessing your site as a result of an error in the robots.txt file. This happens mostly when the site is moved from one domain to another or when the site is newly launched.

Additionally, a site may not rank on search engines when it has broken URLs. When URLs break, it means potential customers cannot view those pages, thus, leaving them disappointed immediately they hit the click button.

Introducing the Kudobuzz SEO App

Since we know how SEO works now, let’s take a look at the Kudobuzz SEO app which uses these ranking points to help your site do well with SEO.

The app has many useful features that can help online merchants identify and fix all SEO related issues affecting their sites.

Page Optimizations

As mentioned above, one key element in search engine optimization is ensuring your site’s page title and page descriptions are well written and contain the keywords you want these pages to rank for. The Kudobuzz SEO app uses smart intelligence to suggest words and sentences used for your page title and descriptions. The app guides you on the preferred length of the text to use and whether you have incorporated the keywords in the title and descriptions appropriately.

Broken links

One of the factors that can lead to poor SEO rankings is having too many broken links on your site. Broken links refer to the pages that are no longer available or have been removed from your site and as a result, show an error page (404 cannot be found).

The Kudobuzz SEO app resolves this issue by first diagnosing your site and detecting all broken links. After detecting the broken links, the app helps you redirect those unavailable pages to other pages that exist on the site. By doing this, the app is making sure your site has no issues with search engines when it comes to broken links.

Image optimisation

The image optimization feature of the Kudobuzz SEO app is great for compressing the size of images while maintaining their quality and adding texts to ALT tags. Sites with huge-sized images have slow loading speed which affects SEO since search engines give low ranking scores for slow loading sites. The app identifies these kinds of images on your site and gives you the option to compress them to suitable sizes in one button click.

A good way to make your site discoverable in image search is to add ALT texts to image tags that do not have them.

Sitemap update

Search engines use sitemaps to know the links on your site to index or re-index. If your site doesn’t have a sitemap submitted, Google and other search engines will take longer in indexing it. Therefore, submitting a sitemap for your site is a great way to boost your site’s SEO.

The Kudobuzz SEO app generates the sitemap file using the pages on your site and then makes it easy for you to submit it to search engines by a click of a button.

Becoming a successful eCommerce merchant is not only about knowing what your customers want but also about making it easier for your prospects to find your products online. Winning the SEO game must be a strategy to adopt. Instead of getting all burnt out and frustrated on your SEO journey, perhaps it’s better to take full advantage of the Kudobuzz SEO app to help you beat even big companies. It offers an easy way to fix most SEO issues that are affecting your site

About the author:

Abdul-Karim Awaf writes for the Kudobuzz blog. Kudobuzz is a provider of easy to use tools that help online merchants increase site traffic and sales. Kudobuzz owns the Kudobuzz Reviews, the Kudobuzz SEO and the Kudobuzz Multichannel Apps.