Best practices for marking up product pages on eccomerce site (SEO noob)

[LeapOfBelief]

After analyzing the code on various competitors eccomerce sites I wanted to seek advice on best practices for marking up individual product pages for keywords and descriptions. My competition is all over the map as far as utilizing keywords and descriptions, some have few keywords while others have many and vice versa for descriptions.

What is the best method for marking up product pages on an eccomerce site for keywords and descriptions?

In addition, is it okay to utilize the same keywords for multiple products that may be under the same category? or is this considered duplicate content?

Thanks for the help, if you have any resources for SEO and eccomerce sites I would greatly appreciate the guidance

best,Michelle & Blake

[LeapOfBelief]

Fred,

Indeed, we are using magento

Blake

[Meriance]

Sorry for the confusion, my question was which software are you using for your e-commerce ? magento ?

fred

[LeapOfBelief]

Hi Fred,

Right now we are utilizing the basics for SEO like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Ubersuggest and of course all the MOZ tools.

Do you have any resources or tools you might suggest to help guide me along the SEO journey for optimizing an eccomerce site?

Thanks for the response,

M & B

[LeapOfBelief]

Thanks for your response Peter,

To sum it up I should make sure the site is properly themed or "siloed"?

I'll shift focus on writing for my audience and providing descriptions that leave no stone unturned, as for keywords I think I will follow your advice as less is better.

Thanks for the helpful response,

M & B

[Meriance]

Hi Michelle & Blake,

You should tell us a bit more about the tools your using for your e-commerce website. With many major e-commerce applications, you have a huge amount of tools to help you with your setup and easy the best-practice learning curve.

Good luck,

Fred

[crackingmedia]

Hi Michelle & Blake

SEO has been changing a lot, especially over the last few months in particular. I would encourage you to optimise your product pages with clear structured categorised titles. They will inevitably incorporate keywords, but don't focus on the keywords as such, focus on clearly explaining the products to your site visitors in the subsequent product description.

In the future, sites that use multiple keywords per product are not going to gain an advantage by doing that - in fact it may even have a negative impact. SEO needs to be about writing for your audience, your site visitor, and making sure the content of your pages answer the questions they may be asking about your products and perhaps what related products you have.

It may hep your SEO in future to use structured data markup with your products (see http://schema.org/) but at this stage focus on getting your pages right as they are.

Using the same keywords for multiple products under the same category will be fine, but just distinguish them by using other words that describe them. For example, red sofa, black sofa, white sofa all repeat the word "sofa" but they are different.

Duplicate content will only come into play if you repeat a large proportion of the content of a page across two or more other pages on your site. If you focus on providing good clear descriptions for each product, you won't go far wrong.

I hope that helps,
Peter