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March 7th, 2010 by Mike
A lot of Ecommerce sites have been way off in search engines listings for a variety of reasons. Some of them are because a lot of online stores have less informative and useful data in their sites and also, most of them have little or no product description of what they have to offer at all. Aside from these, they also have no exclusive user generated content and have unsatisfactory internal linking around their sites. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, these Ecommerce sites experience a lot of difficulties and challenges. Read below and learn 25 tips to successfully optimize Ecommerce sites.
1. Follow the site’s Page Yield. Page yields are one of the best determinations in measuring the length of SEO’s so called “long tail”. You can do this by putting your page yield to the Google test. Every website has keywords for optimization – that includes your site. So what you have to do is take those keywords that are linked to your site and divide it by the number of pages that Google indexes. This will be equal to your page yield, which is also one of the factors in determining the effectiveness of a website in general.
2. Use Title Attributes when making links. Even if title attributes are not that important as the anchor text, they are one of the factors used in the ranking algorithm. In order to give search engines with more information about what your website contains, you should be able to use the appropriate title attributes for all anchor texts in your site.
3. Make Brand Landing Pages. You should set up optimized landing pages for every brand you sell so that customers could easily find what they are looking for.
4. Internal Site Search Optimization. A lot of online visitors, especially the new ones make use of search engines to look for products or websites they want to visit. In this line, they would also expect full workability of the internal site search of your page. Make sure you make it fully functional and optimized.
5. Image Optimization. A large increase in traffic from an image search is the result of populating alt text attributes with the product and brand name of a certain site. Make sure you do the same to all your product images to optimize them.
6. Avoid using “view” or “more” on your product category pages. Using “view” or “more” with you product landing pages makes the spiders ignore your product because it tells them nothing. Make sure you put a little effort in your product landing pages.
7. Avoid stuffing keywords in your navigation. A lot of keywords that are stuffed in the navigation area are useless nowadays because of the improvement of search engines. Make sure you only use important keywords that will point to your site’s important pages.
8. Create a navigation that allows spiders. JavaScript and CSS based navigation structures prevent spider from crawling in your site, so you should avoid these structures. If unfortunately you have one of these, try and duplicate the navigation with normal hyperlinks in the footer of each page.
9. Product description links. Come up with keyword links that would link one product to another. This is very effective when targeting vey long keywords. Of course, link building is a mainstay of effective SEO.
10. For duplicate contents, make use of iFrames. Having a duplicate content will get search engines to penalize you. If you have duplicate contents that are going to appear on every page, make sure putting them inside an iframe.
11. Use keyword rich file names for your pages. Definitely, a keyword filled page file name is more useful to a searchbot rather than a simple one.
12. Tagging your products. Give your customers the freedom to tag your products with their own keywords. This way, your product will be more searchable than making a tag of your own.
13. Make a Product Feed. Product RSS Feeds are a great way to getting backlinks that go directly to a site’s landing page. Make sure you create one of your own and have it submitted to your product aggregators.
14. Do not use Session IDs in your URLs. This cookie-less session IDs creates a lot of duplicate contents which confuses the spiders. You can prevent this from happening by using the right type of cloaking.
15. Internal contextual links. In order for a search engine to get all the information it needs about your page, use keyword filled anchor texts within a paragraph to link to a pertinent page.
16. Make sure your main pages get the most PR flow. You can do this by restricting your PR flow on less important pages with the use of JavaScript links, no-follow tags, robots.txt files, and form submit links. This will make sure the flow of traffic will be huge on you category and product pages.
17. Allow customers to review your products. Make your customers rate your products and leave a comment for every transaction they make with you. This will ensure that you guarantee other people that the content in your website is unique.
18. Exclusive Meta Description Tags. Put the same product description that is on your product page to the description meta tags to make sure that you have distinct contents on every product page.
19. Exceptional Meta Keyword Tags. Even if meta content does not have any effect on your ranking, this prevents duplicate contents which also saves you from penalty. Make sure your keywords and description are unique on each product pages.
20. Use unique tag titles. You should avoid extra content that are repeated in each tags to prevent value dilution in the rest of the title tag.
21. Make sure all your products are 2 to 3 click away from your homepage. This will make sure that your product pages will be closer to your PageRank source.
22. Create simple category and product URLs. Avoid using useless IDs and other parameters passing you URL to ensure optimization.
23. Use singular keywords in your Product Pages. Plural keywords are effective in home pages and other landing pages with SEO.
24. In your product database, make an SEO keyword field. Not all people search by brand names. When you product is new, this works best. Create a keyword field in your product database and fill them with commonly searched keywords related to your product.
25. Do not include product descriptions by manufacturers. Make sure what you put in the website is unique. Do not copy and paste the descriptions from the manufacturer’s pages. Your own copy is far more effective for search engine optimisation.
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Greatest! Today I start to build an ecommerce site!
But, can you add some interesting tip & tricks to use your suggest with a CMS as Joomla+virtuemart?
Simone82 from Rome, Italy