OFBiz Tutorials - Page Rank

OFBiz Tutorials article where we will take a moment to discuss the importance of SEO and page ranking for your enterprise eCommerce system. HotWax Media designs eCommerce platforms for a variety of businesses who sell goods and services on the internet. These systems include everything a user would ever need for a fully functional and viable enterprise eCommerce platform. This however is only part of the battle, the second is the ability for your potential customers to easily find you when shopping on the web.

Marketing strategy and site design go hand in hand. One won't work without the other. For instance, you have a highly functional enterprise eCommerce site, a quality product line with competitive pricing, great shipping options and everything else your target consumer is looking for but sales are flat. This is where SEO comes in and makes your product visible to the market place.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the tool that companies across the web are using to ensure that their efforts are profitable. The field of SEO has many intelligent and ambitious professionals, but just like any industry, there are also those that will take your money for little or no work. Having an awareness of the various nuances of online business marketing will help a company to successfully navigate these waters.

The basics, page content, file names, title tags, meta tags, user friendly navigation and so on will get your site a good start. Now the trick is to monitor site performance without it distracting all of your efforts.

An obvious indicator of success is profits. However, SEO takes time and a campaign may need to run for several moths before project results are realized. By beginning with Google PageRank, you will be able to monitor effects of your SEO campaign and see that you are moving toward your marketing goal.

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page describe PageRank as "a model of user behavior" in their article, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". They go on to state, "We assume there is a "random surfer" who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting "back" but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is it's PageRank... a page can (also) have a high Page Rank if there are many pages that point to it, or if there are some pages that to it and have a high PageRank. Intuitively, pages that are well cited from many places around the web are worth looking at."

So now, how does one raise the PageRank of their site? Basically by coming up with a targeted campaign of building links that compliment the content of your site. The strategies employed are varied in their execution. The main thing is when going into an SEO campaign, you have a specific goal in mind and a well structured plan to get there. If the person running your campaign cannot provide you with this then you may want to look for someone else. There are no absolutes in page visibility, but ensuring that a plan is well constructed and understood by everyone involved will help get you the best possible results. It must also be noted that any SEO work is not finite. Keeping your site placed high in the search engine takes constant attention. You can be guaranteed that the competition is working just as hard as you to corner the market.

You can measure PageRank by visiting websites such as http://www.prchecker.info/.

Enterprise eCommerce is a highly competitive marketplace. The web has a limitless potential for customers and creating growth for a company. HotWax Media creates top of the line eCommerce web sites and marketing packages. Contact us today for more information!