SEO for E-Commerce

[augustos]

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

[Jeremy_FP]

Don't forget Google merchant center (the old google base)! It can easily increase sales by 30%.

[augustos]

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

[firstconversion]

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.

[augustos]

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!

[augustos]

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...

[malachiii]

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.

[OcularConcepts]

• 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.

[blu42media]

Thanks David... great points about the product descriptions.  You do have to get creative to stand out!

[David_ODonnell]

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.

[seanmccauley]

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..............................

[blu42media]

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!