Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO and why does your site need it

All these efforts are meant for the smoother and quicker way for people to find your site via search engines - Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others i.e. to make your site attractive for the search engines and compel them to list it as high as possible on the search results page when users are looking up daily deals of some kind or in some area. Making the site attractive for search engines is much different from making it easy to use and attractive for humans i.e. the visual presentation doesn't matter. All search-engines are driven by the text content and omit images, videos, java scripts, etc. indexing all pages they can read when crawling their way through the worldwide web.

Generally, SEO is a complex continued activity. It incurs many techniques, tricks and constant adjustment as the search engines tend to change their relevance calculating algorithms leading to your website ending up on the top or at the bottom of search results page with equal opportunity. So it's better when the optimization itself is employed as a part of the marketing campaign and is accompanied by all other possible tools driving visitors to your site.

Amongst all various methods of search engine optimization, there are only 3 factors that are proven to actually be successful:

1. Keywords - are taken into account by all the most popular search engines. Selecting the keywords is the top priority task your efforts should be focused on.
2. Age - the older your site is, the better ranking it will get on Google, Bing and Yahoo! seem to be not so scrupulous about that factor.
3. Backlinks - the links from other sites leading to yours, the better those links are the higher is the ranking of your site.

SEO for daily deal sites

The bright side of search engine optimization for daily deal sites is that those are usually tailored to a specific geographic area and/or the industry. This is what the keyword selection should rely on, make sure the keywords you pick reflect the locations the deals are being run in and the nature of products sold. On one hand, it's pretty clear what to put there "deals, daily deals, my location, discounts, etc." On the other hand, you plan to take down Groupon and others, so you need to be sure to reach your target audience and rival them. The only way to do so is to come up with accurate and well turned keywords, i.e. they should have medium to low competition and be "long-tail". These are a few suggestions to assist you in keyword choice:

• Relevance - if you have no specific plans in expanding into a certain location, better not to list "daily deals in Narnia" in your keywords.
• Long-tail instead of single word. - chances to get a top ranking with single keyword are elusive, use keywords compound of 3-6 words e.g. "daily deals for kids"
• Rational density - no specific figures can be advised, they should be not too many.
• Variety - use locations and categories, discount rates, products and service names as keywords.

When people are visiting group-buying website more than likely they are not looking for information, their onliest purpose is good shopping. They want to buy some stuff and save money at the same time. But if they are new to this they will need some guidance through group-buying industry and your website particularly, so you can take an advantage of this need and fill in How it works and About pages on your website with SEO friendly relevant content. You are also more than welcome to create other pages and post useful for your website users information there. You should be creative and here's how you can help out your users and throw in some keywords.

Last and most important - the most frequently visited pages of your site will be the deals themselves, so make sure to get some keywords in their content as well.

Tools available at Getsocio

Getsocio provides you with a number of facilities to optimize your site for search engines. Your site already has a proper sitemap located under the URL looking like http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and the available functionality gives you the option to add different meta description and keywords to every page of your site, just fill them into correspondent fields when editing pages via Pages page of Admin section.

Note: if you are using users-only mode hiding deals from unregistered users, the deal pages won't be indexed, as the crawler bots are unlikely to register on your site.

Getsocio generates SEO-friendly URLs by default, but you can always adjust them by entering the correct combination into “code” field when creating a custom page or when publishing a deal. If you have the same keywords density as your competitors, but you also have keywords in your website's pages URLs and titles/headers, it gives your website privileges above the others and, thus, higher ranking positions. And do not forget to throw in some keywords into the deal description field.