SEO for Ecommerce Site (Image Source:- Websprite) |
Ecommerce websites are those huge shopping portals where people engage in buying and selling activities. These websites are large, comprising thousands of pages and as such doing seo for these websites requires a lot of extra effort and a few tricks.
Optimize the Product Page
For an Ecommerce website, the most important page is the product page. Make sure you are having a seo friendly url, proper title tag, unique product description and original user comments. An ideal product page should consist of the following parts:-
Have search engine friendly urls
The url of the product page should be search engine friendly. This can improve your seo and can get you good search engine rankings. An example of search engine friendly url would be :-
http://www.exampleecommerce.com/product-url.php
http://www.exampleecommerce.com/product-url
http://www.exampleecommerce.com/producturl
The above are examples of a good url structure
Example:-
Suppose there is an ecommerce site selling Birthday cakes online, then an ideal product url must match the product name and should be located under the category directory.
http://www.exampleecommerce.com/chocolate-birthday-cake
or
http://www.exampleecommerce.com/cakes/chocolate-birthday-cake
Have a unique description
I have seen many estore owners doing this mistake of adding the description given by the product vendors under the product description. Actually the vendors provide the same description to each and every estore where they sell their products and hence the content becomes duplicate. In order to have a unique description for a product page, you must rewrite the content and add some marketing headlines containing your brand name, your estore name in it. In this way, your site would have something unique in the product description.
Let users comment on the page
Feedbacks are always welcome as these are great ways to judge the popularity of the product. Nowadays the new platform ecommerce stores are having this built in feature of commenting. When the users comment on a particular product, they add some unique content to the page and unknowingly your page becomes a unique source. These feedbacks come from real people and the search engine loves content created by real people.
Have a unique title
You must have a unique title tag for every product page. Having unique titles containing your brand name gives you a better chance of ranking. A good approach to creating unique title is given below:-
Product name: Brand Name
Chocolate Birthday Cake: ExampleBirthdaystore.com
Make use of Product images
Images contained in the product page have a lot more use that what you thought previously. An image has several properties and as a successful seo strategy, you must use all these image properties effectively. These properties are image description, image alt tag and the image title tag. You must use the product name in these areas to optimize your product pages.
Use the power of Sitemaps
Sitemaps are an easier way to notify the search engines whenever you add new pages to your websites. Maintain both sitemap.html and sitemap.xml as this will help in the easy crawling of your website and will give you the maximum benefit.
Here is an useful video from Matt Cutts which would help you in understanding the basics of doing seo for ecommerce site:-
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uf7gEfAKoaw
Also see:-
Mobile Seo
Seo Tutorial
Stop words in Seo
Navigation in Seo
List of free Seo tools
List of Seo tools
How to do effective keyword research