Ecommerce SEO

Electronic Commerce websites popularly known as eCommerce sites are some of the largest in the world.  Thousands or even millions of products generate millions of links, thereby implementing and managing SEO (Search Engine Optimization)  strategy for an eCommerce site is extremely challenging and poses potential time constraints.

SEO friendly navigation and internal link networks are vital for search engine spiders to crawl your site. Use the sidebar on the homepage to link category landing pages and make sure that the site map has an organized structure that lists all the main product categories.  Internally linking product description pages together through “recommended product” links or “those who searched this also like this” links is an effective way to pass link juice throughout the site.

Some of the most essential SEO factors to be considered by e-retailers are as follows

1. Site Architecture

Great site architecture is all about improving how users and search engines find their way around your site. It’s about getting the best, most relevant content in front of users and reducing the number of times they have to click to find it. The same applies to search engines, by flattening your site architecture; you can make potential gains in indexation metrics such as the number of pages generating search engine traffic and the number of pages in a search engine index.

2. Internal Search Engines

Utilize the internal search engine to support SEO efforts.  So many sites have beyond mediocre search engines where customers will search for product and nothing shows up.  But, when navigating through the sites pages, that product is listed.  eCommerce sites need to be able to produce search queries for product names, models, SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) and relative items.  Investing in powerful internal search engines is a necessity for a successful eCommerce site.

Unlike tracking external search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, which generally only list keywords for which you rank,  internal search metrics provide you with much more valuable information.  Internal search engines can help you understand which keywords customers are actually using which will help with targeted external SEO and PPC (Pay per Click).  This internal search data will also show which keywords are converting into sales and which keywords are causing people to leave the site.

3. User Experience

User experience is crucial to a successful eCommerce site.  After looking through sites such as Amazon.com, Overstock.com and Newegg.com, there are a few user experience factors that these successful eCommerce sites have in common. In this fast paced world we all live in, no one wants to click through three pages of the site to finally see the price of a product, thus, upfront pricing and product descriptions are necessary for conversions.  Product sorting options are also great for a user, for example, showing highest or lowest priced items, best-selling items, newest items or relevant items at the top of the on-site search query.

Creatively designed Rich Snippets, while not necessarily increasing search rankings, improves the presentation of pages in the search results, increases click though rates and increases the user experience. 

4. Website URLs

Another SEO practice that needs to be looked at is the use of long, crazy URLs.  There are countless numbers of eCommerce sites that use URLs that do not use keywords and are not SEO friendly.  For example, this fictitious site, http://www.myecommercestore.com/, uses a URL that looks something like this for a product page that sells military style cargo shorts, “http://myecommercestore.com/ – productid=9876/, when it should look something like this, “http://www.myecommercestore.com/ -military-cargo-shorts/.  Using keywords in the URL will add benefit to SEO.

5. Product Detail Pages

Having optimized content on product description pages is one of the most important SEO factors for ecommerce because they contain the most valuable content which determines the ultimate buying decision of the ecommerce customer. The product description page is where the customer finds pictures, product specifications, reviews, and pricing options to eventually make a buying decision.

6. Product Feeds

It is common for small, mid-size and even large e-commerce sites to offer feeds of their products for use by affiliates. While this is a terrific marketing tactic, it can result in an exact copy of your product pages appearing on other sites. Not only does this result in duplicate content, but can result in sites with better authority or better organization outranking you for your own products!

If possible, provide an alternate version of your product information in your feeds, which will ensure that each product page on your site is unique. Another tactic is to only include select fields in your feeds, and reserve the full product data set for use on your own site.  Probably the most effective strategy is to build out user-generated content, such as reviews, on your site to ensure your own product pages are unique, while beefing up the keyword universe on any given page.

7. Breadcrumbs

Consider the following factors to be very essential for implementing breadcrumbs effectively:

* Be consistent – If you’re going to include breadcrumbs on one page, include them – in the same place, using the same stylization – on every page. This gives you the maximum possible number of links, while maintaining a consistent atmosphere for readers.

* Use the appropriate link structure - For each element of the breadcrumb path, the title of the referenced page should be used as the anchor text, enabling users to quickly jump between tiers of pages on your site.

* Exclude the current page – Breadcrumb navigation should only include links to pages in the tiers above the active page. It isn’t necessary and would, in fact, be confusing to add a link to the current page within the breadcrumb.

8. Social Factors

This is now such a widely-recognized sentiment that it almost seems commonplace, but simply jumping on the social media bandwagon will not necessarily result in substantial SEO benefits. As with other marketing activities, it is important to identify and exploit opportunities that will specifically benefit search marketing efforts.

For on-site content, user-generated comments and reviews offer a way of enriching the keyword universe of a page, and the continual addition of content provides the search engines with a reason to spider these pages more often (and rank them higher based on content freshness, if this is indeed a significant ranking factor.) Aside from your main e-commerce site, supporting social media locations such as corporate blogs can also broaden your content base and provide inbound links that will benefit your main site through interlinking.

Social Media should not be overlooked.  Google does take Likes, Shares and Retweets into consideration when determining search rankings.  Adding Facebook Like, Share and Twitter Tweet buttons to the product description pages will allow users to link to the site through social media.  Interacting with your customers in social media is an amazing way to increase brand awareness and conversions.

9. Proper Redirection

Once the SEO friendly URLs are set, please make sure if additional steps are required for  the search engines to credit each of your pages properly.  Often, this involves creating proper redirection to improve the flow of SEO authority throughout your site.

The following are a few of the different types of redirection you’ll want to have in place:

i.) WWW versus non-WWW – Select one or the other for consistency in your backlinking efforts, but then also set up 301 redirects that inform the search engine spiders that both versions of your URLs should be treated the same.

ii.) Homepage redirection – Although it’s commonly seen in the internet retailing world, don’t automatically redirect your root URL to another page on your site. Doing so will prevent the link equity you receive to your homepage URL from being distributed correctly, resulting in less effective SEO.

iii.) Past model years – If you sell product lines that are updated each year, create new pages for your latest models but then redirect all pages from past years to the newest version using 301 redirect codes.

iv.) Proper redirection might seem complicated to implement, but it’s worth the extra effort in terms of ensuring that your site’s accumulated SEO authority is distributed correctly.

10. Noindex and nofollow

Another SEO for eCommerce best practice you’ll want to pay attention to is the use of noindex tags to indicate to the search engines that certain pages should be left out of the search results and nofollow link tags that prevent PageRank from being distributed to unimportant pages.

For most eCommerce sites, you’ll want to implement noindex and nofollow tags on the following site pages:

i.)   Contact page

ii.)  Order and shopping cart pages

iii.) User account pages

iv.) Archive pages

Noindexing these and any other unimportant pages on your robots.txt file and adding nofollow tags to any internal links pointing to these pages will help the search engine spiders determine how to focus both their indexing and ranking activities most effectively.

 11. Proper Canonicalization

If you use any type of CMS or ecommerce platform to manage your website, there’s a good chance your system is automatically creating multiple URLs that all point to the same page.  If you allow all of these pages to be indexed individually, you risk having your site subjected to duplicate content filters.

The best solution for this issue is the “rel=canonical” tag.  When added to the <head> section of each of your pages, the canonical tag allows you to specify whether or not the search engine spiders should index each given page or treat it the same as another URL.

And while you can add these tags by hand, a much better alternative is to search for an external plug-in or add-on program that’ll allow you to create canonical tags automatically.

12. Site Speed

If you’re running your website off an eCommerce platform like Magento, Big Commerce or Volusion, be aware that the size of these systems can result in decreased site speeds.  To compensate, you’ll need to purchase web hosting that can support your chosen program, as well as take on-site actions (like combining scripts to minimize necessary launch resources or host images and other files on off-site CDNs) in order to improve site speed as much as possible.

13. Fresh Content

If there’s one thing that all website owners – not just eCommerce retailers – should take from the recent Penguin update, it’s that content quality matters when it comes to SEO.  And if your website is still populated with the same stagnant content you put up when you first launched a few years ago, you simply can’t compete with newer, more active sites when it comes to overall quality.

As an internet retailer, one of the best things you can do for your website is to include a blog or other feature that allows you to post regular, fresh content updates.  Not only will this allow you to improve the relationships you have with your readers, it’ll also increase your potential keyword exposure and improve your odds of being featured in the SERPs included in Google’s recent freshness update.

Considering all the above SEO factors, we can implement the following as SEO tips

1. Maintain a Uniform and Clean Website Structure: The home page of your website should reflect the product categories; while all the inner pages should follow a common webpage structure. 

2. Use a Unique Title Tag: Every product page should have a unique title. An eCommerce site can contain any number of web pages. You can ask the programmer to code the title from the page content and product name. This makes your SEO more dynamic.

3. Select an Appropriate Keyword: The keywords must be unique for every webpage. They must reflect the important phrases within the webpage content. For an eCommerce site, you can ask the programmer to select keywords from the content and product name.

4. Create a Relevant Description Per Web Page: The description of a web page is the snippet which appears in the SERPS. Every visitor reads the snippet and then clicks on the search result. It is very important to include a description relevant to the webpage content.

5. Include Breadcrumbs for All Inner Pages: A breadcrumb is like a secondary navigation structure. It helps the visitor to navigate back to the main product category page. A breadcrumb also helps in the internal linking of the website. Overall, including a breadcrumb makes the website SEO friendly. 

6. Use a Heading Tag: Searchbots assign a lot of importance to the heading tag. The heading tag is SEO friendly and can be used to format the title of the web page content.

7. Avoid Usage of Flash: Avoid using flash on every web page of your eCommerce website. This will expand the site loading time. If the use of flash is inevitable, include textual content in the flash. Search engines are capable of reading the text in the flash file.

8. Optimize Images: Add the Alt tag to all the images of your website. Search engines cannot read images. The Alt tag is a means of ensuring that the search engines read the alternate text for images.

9. Optimize Anchor Text: Anchor text appears between the anchor opening and closing tag. It is good practice to use keywords as the anchor text.

10. Create an SEO Friendly URL Structure: The default URL structure of a dynamic website contains parameters. Search engines are not capable of understanding these parameters. A good URL structure must contain words separated by hyphens. 

11. Generate a XML Sitemap: A XML sitemap contains all the URLs present in the website and makes it easy for searchbots to find and index all web pages. If the number of web pages on a site is large, you can create a number of XML sitemaps and then submit these sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. E.g. sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml.

12. Limit the Number of Outbound Links: Always link to a safe and secure website. If you are not sure about the quality of the website you are linking out to, use the no follow attribute.

13. Submít to Search Directories: Forward your website URL to good quality search directories. Most of the search directories take a few weeks to link back to a site. Fill in the details of the submission form carefully, so that the administrator accepts the submission.

14. Submít to Article Directories and Social Bookmarking Sites: Article submission is the quickest way of obtaining high quality backlinks. You need to select the do follow bookmarking sites and submit the URL to them. Growth in traffic is a plus point of submitting to social bookmarking sites.

15. Integrate a Secure Payment Gateway: A secure payment gateway is the heart of an Ecommerce website. Get a trust seal from Verisign, TrustE, etc. Visitors will be more likely to trust your site and to make an online payment.

16. Track User Behavior with a Good Analytics Tool: You can track and analyze visitor behavior with a good analytics tool. You need to select an analytics tool based on your requirements. If your eCommerce website operates on a large scale, you can opt for a paid analytics tool. Otherwise you can use a variety of free tools to obtain the best results.

Latest Trends : Video & Visual Search

Numerous studies have shown the power of video and rich images to enhance our ability to process information quickly. While the web originally was almost completely text-based (HTML to be precise), that is changing. By some measures YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and it’s no surprise: people prefer to consume certain types of information in video format, and high-quality video support in modern browsers is the standard.

Statistics cited by Bing note that web visitors are able to process information up to 30% more rapidly when it’s provided in a combination of video and text, rather than text alone. Additionally, 65% of us are visual learners, and more likely to digest information and learn from it, in a visual form. Most types of eCommerce  notably apparel and products suited to emotional and personal tastes, excel with visual additions.

There is no doubt that video can be powerful on the web as a conversion tool, as well. A comScore study revealed that when video was included in the shopping experience, visitors were 64% more likely to purchase than without it, and stayed on the site for an additional 2 minutes.

Inference

While Google is the top dog and should be of primary focus in SEO, Bing is an important component of a well-ordered, strategic campaign. In addition to incremental increases in traffic from Bing, eCommerce sites can expect a much more shopping-prone demographic: numbers released by Microsoft state that Bing users are 11% more likely to buy than Google users, and 31% more likely to purchase than the web’s general user. It is a decidedly “shoppy” demographic that eCommerce companies should not ignore.

Trends in eCommerce and SEO continue to surprise. Staying on top of consumer shopping behavior with discounts and free shipping, offering rich product pages and video, and embracing the coming wave of visual search, will pay dividends. Additionally, ecommerce teams should pay special attention to duplicate content issues, especially at the product and search levels, and with faceted navigation.

References

• http://www.palmerwebmarketing.com/blog/25-ecommerce-seo-tips/
• http://www.macronimous.com/resources/SEO_for_Ecommerce_site_development.asp
• http://www.shopify.com/blog/4627892-10-crucial-seo-tips-for-ecommerce-entrepreneurs
• http://www.smarte-commerce.com/tag/seo-tips-for-e-commerce-websites/
• http://www.smarte-commerce.com/
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-for-ecommerce/40596/
• http://searchengineland.com/5-essential-concepts-for-e-commerce-seo-31713
• http://searchengineland.com/3-important-trends-to-watch-in-ecommerce-56890