Posted by Ivan Spirov on Monday, September 13, 2010
Under: SEO
A typical Ecommerce website contains a few hundred pages. An
Ecommerce giant like Amazon contains thousands of products and
millions of web pages. Optimizing a website like Amazon is not
tough; it just requires a strong SEO strategy.
Optimizing an Ecommerce site is slightly different from
optimizing a static website. You need to plan and construct your
optimization strategy well in advance. This will help save
you a lot of time and effort in the future.
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.
It is very easy to rank well and get quality traffic with these
tips. The trick is to maintain the balance of the site being SEO
and user friendly.
What steps do you take to optimize your Ecommerce website?
In : SEO
Tags:
seo