SEO for E-Commerce
-
Hello Guys, First of all, I wanna say that I just have some 1-2 years experience in SEO, I´m not a GURU or expert ok? So, take it easy... I have one costumer which wanna develop a E-COMMERCE focusing SEO and best pratices of web development. What care should I have? I mean the most important issues... From the coice of domain name to very specific point. What is the main mistakes SEO made at develop a E-COMMERCE? Thanks so much
-
Don't forget Google merchant center (the old google base)! It can easily increase sales by 30%.
-
Hey man,
sorry i didnt catch what u mean the front-end dev and designer, so far i knew they're different job positions and porpuses, no?
Our competitors all have the design of last century...
So, probably we're going to try something much more cooler than them.
thanks for your comm
-
Dont use a designer to design it, use a front end developer
Design everything to be modular, with the intention that every thing can be tested once live. Design to test.
-
Thanks for your explain.
It's a market niche ( dance products ). like, ballet slippers, some dance cloths... this kind of products to be sell only trough ecommerce.
About the platform, we're going to develop it from begining don't like the idea to use something available in the internet is better the make your own, regarding im in charge of the SEO not all the process...
Thanks fellow!
-
Hello, thanks for your answer buddy! I'm considering in develop some in-page nice stuff, such as consumer review, score (based in the consumer review) this kind of stuff... I belive might help well our rankings for those unique pages...
-
I worked for about 3 years in the mid 2000's on an ecommerce site with great SEO strengths. Enough can't be said about choosing the right ecommerce platform. There are quite a few to choose from, and choosing the wrong platform can create an uphill battle for SEO from the start. The platform we used was X-cart.. it was amazing and had a lot of features and add-ons that made SEO a breeze... the draw back is that it's very expensive. Magento IMO is a fantastic alternative to X-cart and fixes a lot of legacy issues that have crept up over time. If I were you, I would avoid zencart and oscommerce, but once again that is just my opinion.
As for straight up SEO tips
- organize URLs to display categories and products correctly.
- enable caching to speed up website load times
- dont forget the alt tags
- avoid dupe content issues (best advice would be to never copy and paste descriptions on anything, always rewrite)
- enable reviews
- send product feeds to amazon, google, etc.
a few other tips on usability
- imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Fortune 500 companies have amazing budgets to figure out how to sell products, check out their pages for inspiration.
- look at popular ecommerce sites online, see what they do right. amazon, tigerdirect, victorias secret, etc. You'll find that simple is often the best way
- make the buying decision easy. depending on your product, make the price and purchase button green. that may be my best tip for you.. we saw about 15% higher conversions just by changing those two things.
- respond and interact with your customers ASAP a la woot.com
hope this helps.
-
- Place user reviews on your site. This should help.
- Ad David said, do not use product description which is duplicate.
- Category pages should have content on them rather than just images and links.
- Titles of webpages should be keyword focused.
- Build as many deep links as possible.
- Have an XML sitemap generator and submit the sitemap file to Google.
-
Thanks David... great points about the product descriptions. You do have to get creative to stand out!
-
Nice one, John.
Also specific to e-commerce sites, often they have the same product description copied from the manufacturer as thousands of other sites. Unique product descriptions and UGC, such as ratings and reviews can help make product pages unique.
-
We have gone through this experience and lived to tell the tale;
1. Choose a domain name with keyword included. Your client is unlikely to become the next google or amazon, therefore domain name is important for two reasons; user understanding and SEO friendliness. A perfect example is overstock.com. So, if your client is selling riding jackets then get a url such as ridingjackets.com or ridingjacketsshop.com or a hyphenated version at least.This will make your SEO work easier and also increase ctr on organic results.
2. Choose an SEO friendly ecommerce platform. We chose osCommerce which although it has some SEO modules was a mistake and for more reasons than just SEO. Magento is probably the best choice.
3. Follow good onsite practice, relevant title tags, urls, meta descriptions (ex SEO guru Danny Dover's SEO Secrets explains most of this). Avoid Duplicate content and write as much original material as you can. Seomoz crawl diagnostics is perfect to keep you right on these issues. Write good meta descriptions. Perhaps avoid meta keywords
4. Submit to Directories
5. Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product, Write Content, Build Relationships, Sell Product..............................
-
You're in the right place for SEO help... most folks in here really want to be here, so no worries about ego bashing.
What are you planning on using for a platform to develop the site?
Tricky areas to watch out for on e-commerce sites include handling of duplicate content on category (list) type pages vs. actual product pages, particularly if they are nested and search result pages. You will definitely want to use your rel="canonical" tags.
As for the domain name, it's certainly helpful to include keywords, but it's not the end of the world if you don't. You're really developing a brand. Think of ebay or twitter even. Clearly, no keywords to be found.
If you're talking about the rest of the URL, then yes, make sure you work with a platform that has good SEO support: search-engine friendly URLs, meta title & meta description support, and a place to enter descriptions for your images at the very least.
That's a start... certainly ask if you have other questions!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does Hiding the article´s date in a blog affect SEO?
We are running a blog and would like to hide date, as users find the article less interesting if they are dated more than 2 years ago. Will hiding the article´s date in a blog affecto SEO? Thanks in advance u2cJxsr
On-Page Optimization | | goperformancelabs0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
International SEO - differentiating Meta data
Hi, We are developing a website for a company based in the US, but that also distributes to the UK. After careful thought, we decided to go with adding subdirectories for the UK pages on the site rather than creating content on a new ccTLD (though they own that domain). 1. How much of the Title Tags, H1, content, needs to be different for UK versions of the same page. Is it enough to simply Geo tag the EN subdirectory in Webmaster Tools? Or do the Title tags and content need to be different in order to avoid keyword cannibalization? 2. Would it be better to create a Landing Page using the ccTLD .co.uk version with information that links to the .com/en version? This would allow the users to see the .co.uk version for trust-building purposes. Or, would it just be better to 301 redirect the .co.uk version to the .com/en? Thanks for your help! Erin
On-Page Optimization | | HiddenPeak0 -
SEO Structure - Best Advice
Hi Mozzers, I'm wondering if I need to tweak my SEO friendly URL structure slightly. Example: http://www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-celine/celine-bags would this be better for SEO if it was: http://www.vintageheirloom.com/vintage-celine/bags Perhaps the repetition of 'celine' is unnecesary, but OpenCart ecommerce CMS requires a plugin / modification to enable multiple use of a single term like e.g. 'bags'. Any benefit for $30? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | well-its-1-louder0 -
SEO for luxury brands!?
Hi all, It is widely known fact that you will be a bit in trouble if you will need to do SEO for luxury brand that is not willing to sacrifice design, layout etc. for SEO purposes. So basically - there is no content to optimize and there is almost no keywords to rank! 😉 Just wondering - how would be the best to approach such kind of terrible situation? Regards, Jungle
On-Page Optimization | | Jungles0 -
Are pages with lots of pictures with outbound links bad for seo?
"Inspiration" blog posts are a good example. The one below has 80 pictures as part of a logo inspiration page. But each picture has an outbound url. Bad or doesn't matter? http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/80-creative-and-well-designed-logos/
On-Page Optimization | | seo_f20120 -
Geo-targeted content and SEO?
I am wondering, what effect does geo-targeted "cookie cutter" content have on SEO. For example, one might have a list of "Top US Comedians", which appears as "Top UK Comedians" for users from the United Kingdom. The data would be populated with information from a database in both cases, but would be completely different for each region, with the exception of a few words. Is this essentially giving Google's (US-based) crawler different content to users? I know that plenty of sites do it, but is it legitimate? Would it be better to redirect to a unique page, based on location, rather than change the content of one static page? I know what the logical SEO answer is here, but even some of the big players use the "wrong" tactic. I am very interested to hear your thoughts.
On-Page Optimization | | HalogenDigital0 -
What do you think about Alexa SEO audit?
I wonder if somebody had an experience with alexa's audit. What kind of information they provide? Is it completely useless?
On-Page Optimization | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0