SEO for Ecommerce Sellers

SEO – the process of altering your site to give it the best possible chances of ranking in the search engines – is just as important for ecommerce sellers as it is for blog and informational site owners.  However, there are a few SEO concerns that are unique to ecommerce sellers, so if you aren’t seeing the rankings you feel you deserve, be sure to check out the following tips.

Overall Site Optimization

For the most part, optimizing an ecommerce site correctly revolves around ensuring each product page is properly setup.  However, before we get to this more detailed SEO, there are a few things you’ll want to adjust on a site-wide level to give your site the best possible chances of ranking well in the SERPs.

Site URL and Title

Ideally, every page of your site should be targeting a single keyword – and your homepage is no exception.  Your site should be based around a category-level keyword, which should be incorporated into your homepage’s title, description and heading tags, as well as your URL.  Keep in mind, though, that the search engines only consider the first 65-70 characters of these elements, so be sure that your target keyword falls within these parameters if you couch it in longer phrases or sentences.

For example, suppose you run an ecommerce site selling pet products.  If your category-level keyword is “dog toys”, this keyword should be found in your URL and the other locations described above.  If you use a sentence in your title or headline tags, “The Best Dog Toys on the Internet” is a better option than “Look No Further for the Web’s Largest Selection of Reasonably Priced, Durable Dog Toys.”

Site Navigation

Another crucial consideration for site owners is the overall navigation structure of the site.  Google and the other search engines prefer navigation structures that are wide instead of deep, meaning that every page on the site should be able to be accessed within 2-3 clicks of the homepage.  If it takes your visitors six or more separate clicks to reach some of the pages on your site, you’re losing out from both an SEO perspective and an ease-of-use standpoint.

Another important navigation concern for ecommerce sellers is the problem of session IDs and sort parameters in product page URLs.  If you use an ecommerce program that generates product pages on the fly, you may encounter product page URLs that are appended with these extraneous characters, like the following example:

http://www.example.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=tpb&search_sort=relevance&search_category=25

 

URLs that are generated like this can present problems with how pages are indexed by the search engine spiders and can lead to unintended duplicate content penalties.  One alternative would be to use an ecommerce solution that generates cookies instead of custom product page URLs, but if you aren’t able to switch ecommerce providers, be sure to add a rel=”canonical” element to the head section of each page to ensure the search engines only index your defined pages.

Product Page Optimization

Once you’ve addressed these major site-wide optimization issues, you’ll want to modify your product-specific pages to be sure you aren’t unintentionally triggering any SEO penalties.  Here’s what you need to do…

Generate Custom Content

Product-specific pages often get knocked for two separate problems – duplicate content when compared with the manufacturer’s website (if applicable) and duplicate content from page to page within the site.

In the first case, if you’re selling products manufactured by another company, you’ll find that it’s pretty tempting to simply copy the product description that the manufacturer provides and paste it to your own site (or alternatively, if you import the manufacturer’s product feed, this may be done automatically).  Unfortunately, the search engines hate to see these descriptions pasted over and over again, which could lead to a duplicate content penalty levied against your site.

But even if you do take the time to write your own product descriptions (which is obviously necessary from an SEO standpoint), you could still find yourself facing a penalty if you include set descriptors on each product page on your site.  For example, if you use similar terminology and call-outs to describe each product you sell (such as the headers “Product Description”, “Sizes Available,” and “Product Specifications”), you could trigger a duplicate content penalty for using these same phrases across your site.

To avoid this issue, consider integrating product details into your overall description instead of calling out each specific feature under a boiler plate header.  You can easily describe a product’s specifications in paragraph form, versus filling out each product description according to a boilerplate template.

If you absolutely can’t avoid using the same categories on each page, consider serving up your in-page content within an iFrame.  Your visitors won’t know that they aren’t reading content directly off of your page, but the search engines won’t be able to detect it and use it to trigger a duplicate content penalty.

Optimize Each Product Listing

Aside from each product’s description (where you’ll obviously want to include your target keyword), there are a number of other places where you’ll want to include your keywords in order to help the search engines determine what each page is about and where it should rank in the SERPs.  Be sure to check each page you create against the following list:

• Product Page Title – Whether you write your own page titles or import them from a manufacturer’s product feed, be sure your target keyword is located within the first 70 characters of your product page title.
• · Product Page URL – Which of the following options looks better: http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1 or http://www.example.com/green-dress.html?  Both search engines and site visitors prefer the latter, so look into plugins or scripts that rewrite your page URLs into SEO-friendly options.

• · Keyword and Description Meta Tags – Even though both of these elements have decreased in their SEO importance in the last few years, it’s still a good idea to set up keyword-rich page-level keyword and description meta tags for every product page you create.

• · Product Tags – Depending on the ecommerce solution you use, you may have the option of tagging each product on your site.  If you do have access to this functionality, be sure to add keyword-rich tags for every product you add to your site.

• · Product Images – For every image you add to your product pages (and you should be adding images to your product pages!), be sure to set up both the file name and alt text of each image to reflect your target keywords for maximum SEO benefit.

Of course, while you’ll want to address each of these items on your site’s product pages, be sure not to go overboard and keyword spam your pages.  According to Karen Frishman, Director of Marketing for Ruby Lane:

“Keyword spamming is when keywords are repeatedly used, or when keywords are used that do not related to the item in an attempt to manipulate search results. This also includes listing an item without knowing what the item is.”

By using your keywords reasonably and setting up your pages according to the principles described above, you’ll position your site to earn the best possible rankings in the SERPs, resulting in more traffic and – ultimately – more sales for your company.

Image: peterandringa